Last Sunday I wrote from my hospital bed at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Hospital in Hanover, NH.  Now I am recuperating in beautiful North Hatley, QC Canada. On Monday I had an angioplasty that found a 90% block in my right coronary artery and so they put in a stent.  I watched the whole thing and it was fascinating.  They put a catheter in through my femoral artery which did not hurt as they had numbed it first and as the doc said, the inside of your arteries don’t have pain receptors so I didn’t feel anything as they snaked it up to my heart.  They pushed in the dye and bingo, they saw the offending artery and they fixed it up.  Modern medicine is amazing.  The team that did the procedure do hundreds of these a month and are awfully good and actually made me feel they could do anything – or maybe that was the Valium.  Anyway, 24 hours later I was released with prescriptions and a recommendation to rest and not overdue it.  No muscle damage and since my diet and exercise has been pretty good and consistent it is more a matter of getting my strength back.  I was pretty tired and admit that things are not the same as they were a week ago.

How do I reconcile this with all that I have been learning through my course at IIN?  The lectures and the teaching all say that “Food is Medicine and Medicine is Food” and I believe it.  BUT?  I am on five different medications and that does not make me happy.  I could look back at our lectures and see where we referenced Bill Clinton and his need to change to a vegan diet because he needed help in managing his coronary artery disease and perhaps that is the route I need to go.  I have eliminated so many things from my diet already but maybe, just maybe, not quite enough to fight the genetics that I came with.  I don’t mind the idea of a plant based diet and really do not have a problem eliminating meat from my diet but I would rather like to keep fish and the Greek yogurt that I have with berries and homemade granola in the morning.  I have a feeling that there is more research that I need to do and also some experts that I need to consult but for now, I am reducing the animal protein, upping the veggies and fruit and seriously curtailing cheese except for Goat cheese.  And resting!!!!

Our lessons this week dovetailed right into this new normal for me.  The discussion centered around the mass production of meat in the U.S. and the fact that it is not sustainable and also it is cruel.  Many years ago I worked in Amarillo for 18 months on a computer project for the school district.  I would pass the feed lots and would always feel just miserable after I saw those animals being fattened up before slaughter.  I can’t think about it without feeling sick and I think that was the beginning for me of thinking twice about what I was eating and where it came from.  In the last few years that has become more and more the way I think about food.  My family have a difficult time when I say the words vegan or vegetarian.  Perhaps what I really want to be is a what Dr. Mark Hyman calls Pegan which is a blend of Paleo and Vegan.  I want to eat only pasture raised food and wild fish and now I have a darn good reason to explore this option.  We are lucky where we live that there is a Farmer’s Market and local producers for meat, chicken and eggs.  Finding the fish is a little harder.  We get salmon but it is from the salmon farms in New Brunswick.  If I can find it, I prefer the Pacific or Alaskan Coho Salmon and sometimes Scottish Salmon is available.

Back to the sustainable thing.  Please check out Howard Lyman – better known for being a former cattleman turned vegan.  His website is Madcowboy.  You might have seen him on Oprah.  Cattle use up one of our main resources and that is water and they produce methane gas which is a contributing factor to the climate change.  The South Americans have cut down the Rain Forest to raise beef and there won’t be another Rain Forest to take its place.  Something has to change on a global scale if we want the health of the people of this world and the health of the planet to improve.  Every journey starts with one step.

Now I walk.  Working my way back up to my five miles a day and in the fall will go back to Zumba and perhaps add Pure Barre to the mix.  The summer will be for relaxing and looking at the beautiful view and enjoying my family and friends.  Minimize the worrying especially about things I can do nothing about.  I am so grateful for the outpouring of support and love from family, friends and people in my life.  I cannot tell you what it has meant to John and to me to get the emails, ecards, iMessages, phone calls, cards and flowers.  I do not think I knew how many people I knew.  It helps – it helps a lot and Thank YOU!

Have a wonderful week.  I know I will.

Lou