Colin

My great friend of the last 35 years, Colin, had a heart attack a month ago.  Now, he is the last person on earth you would expect that to happen to.  He’s slim; he’s fit; he eats healthily….. yet he has a heart attack, and this has led to him having a double heart bypass operation.  That was done on Friday, and when I saw him on Saturday evening, expecting him to be looking groggy and perhaps a bit grey, I was astonished to see him sitting in the chair by his bed looking every bit as healthy as he normally looks, but with a few tubes and wires attached!

He’d have you believe the whole thing was No Big Deal!   Pain?  (Shrug.) It’s OK!   For goodness sake, he’s just had his ribs broken to get to the heart.  Well he’s not going to be able to do a lot for a while.  On Sunday he’d had all the wires and tubes removed, and had had a walk with a nurse along the corridor and back!  It’s not a short corridor either!  Today, he’s to tackle stairs, and tomorrow morning he’s to do some exercise biking – and so far he’s been scheduled to come home in the afternoon!

Colin has done loads of good turns for me over the years, so now it’s payback time!  My turn to do something significant for him!  So I’m going to stay at his place and look after him for the next few weeks!  He’ll probably be telling me to go home after a week or so – either from being bossed about or from my cooking!  I think he’ll have to teach me to do more than porridge and scrambled eggs!   No, I’m not really that bad, but I hate cooking normally! As a plaque I was given a few years ago says – I only do three meals: frozen, microwave and take-away!  So this will be a challenge!  …. and I’ll be eating healthily too so will maybe lose a few pounds, which can’t be bad!

He’ll be wanting to do more than he physically can do, so that will be the difficulty – keeping him from doing too much.  Anyway, we’ll see how things go!   Luckily he lives just along the road from the Garden Centre where he spends most of his time, so he can get along there and sit in the cafe or outside  in the sun – if it deigns to shine this summer  - with his friends there coming to chat to him.  I expect there will be no shortage of visitors with all his rock climbing buddies coming to see him.  Yesterday he was already planning his return to the rock faces of England (he lives in the north of England) and elsewhere.  Not that he was serious!  It was just a jokey conversation with a climbing friend who came to visit at the hospital – but he’ll be back climbing as soon as he can!  Of that there is NO doubt!

So, today I am getting things organised for my stay at his place, and tomorrow I’ll go and pick him up from the hospital and get him home! 

I’ll have my laptop with me so will still get round the blogging I have missed out on so far.  In between the cooking and the cleaning – she said with tongue in cheek - I’m sure I’ll have some time.

Talk again soon.