The Heart and Heart Disease: A Personal Perspective

First of all, I have to stress that I have no medical training, and that whatever you read in this booklet is my own personal understanding of what I have either read, seen on TV or the Internet or have been been told by all sorts of people from my granny, to a bloke in the pub, to even one of the many doctors and cardiologists I have seen over the past three decades. Some of the advice I have been given may have been incorrect, some may have been garbled, and some I may not have understood, or I may have misremembered.

By reading on, you are deemed to understand what I have written above, and will exercise your own due diligence and caution in accepting the following chapters as being true or otherwise.

Having written that, I will do my best to present you with the facts as I understand them, but always check what I write with your doctor or cardiologist before being so rash as to act upon what I say.

As far as I am concerned, my conscious relationship with my heart began when I was forty. Four memorable events occurred in that year: I got my first responsible office job, I joined a philosophical dining club, I started wearing spectacles (very self-consciously), and I was put on ‘blood pressure tablets’. I now live five thousand miles away from that club, I am thirty years on from being forty, but I am still wearing glasses and taking the tablets. Such is permanence.

I remember as if it were yesterday, my doctor advising me forty years ago that I needed to lose weight and get much more exercise, otherwise I would need blood pressure tablets, and that once I started on those, I would have to take them for the rest of my life. He suggested using my thirty-minute lunch break to briskly walk the half a mile to the third-nearest greengrocer’s, buy a piece of fruit, and walk back to my office. Up until that point, I had been used to getting a pasty or pie from the baker’s next door. Quite often, my secretary would get it for me.

A couple of months later, I was put on Atenolol. It did the trick, and I swapped going to that distant greengrocer’s for crossing the road to the nearest one… and returned to eating pies, but only two or three times a week.