I had the best day yesterday. Each day, I try to do a little more, but I get tired very easily. Yesterday, we went to Valley Falls Park, close to our home. It's a nice park that has trails of varying difficulty. I'm not up to any uphill yet, but there was one trail that is pretty level. I manage to go .68 miles on it in total. I know it doesn't sound like a lot, but to me it felt like 5 miles. And in the evening we took another walk and altogether added up to about 1.25 miles for the day. I was pretty pleased with that.

Most everything I've done in my life has been for others. It's hard for me to remember when I've done something just for me. We've taken vacations and the like, so I guess that's for me as well. But more often than not, I'm taking care of a sick friend. This is the first time in my life that I haven't been able to honestly take care of myself. I feel like I have the stamina of an 85 year old man. I can see now why they don't tell you what recovery will be like after bypass. If they did, there would probably be fewer people having this done.

But that's behind me now, and I really didn't have a choice. Without it, I was a walking time bomb. I found out an interesting thing about my father. He had two heart attacks. I thought he had one that killed him. When he had the first one, the doctors told him to slow down and do less. In those days (1960), they didn't know a lot about risk factors. My father didn't listen to them and in August of 1961, he died of a massive heart attack.

My cardiologist feels that this can all be turned around, but it will be a shift in a lot of things. First, I have to build up my stamina to the point that I can join cardiac rehabilitation. I'm not there yet. They are hoping that in a couple of weeks, I can build myself up to do that.

Another milestone last night was going out to dinner. For the last 3 weeks, I've been staying at home. Kent wanted me to get back into life and go out to dinner. I admit I was a bit concerned about it. I wasn't sure if I should push it too much. But we had a great time. We went to a place called Max Fish. There, you can get just about anything you want. We both had the same thing - medium grilled salmon over salad greens with a lite sherry vinegarette. It was really delicious, very low in fat, and all the good stuff from the fish.

Now I'm off to take my afternoon walk. Have a nice day everyone.