CARDIO REHAB – WEEK 1

The best part of working out in a hospital is the barrier free access to multitudes of strangers open mouth coughing into every single square inch of your breathable airspace. People don’t seem to feel even the slightest inclination to cover their germ spluttering mouths when coughing and hacking in a hospital.

The hallway waiting seating area outside of the Cardiac Rehabilitation center is home to an AED defibrillator wall unit. It has been making a constant, repetitive chirping noise that sort of sounds like a hyperactive canary. I don’t often mentally associate hospitals environments with bird life, so I am not sure what kind of farcical, nature simulation this machine is trying to pull off.
“Ohh is that a bird in this hallway? How lovely, I must be in nature” thought nobody ever.
The volunteer coordinator jokes that hopefully the defibrillator is not going to be required today because the service technician has not arrived to fix it yet. The methodical ‘song bird’ peeps on blissfully and I looked around at the ailing and bemused faces of my fellow classmates. I smiled awkwardly with dinner plate wide eyes, saying a secret prayer that the technician arrived soon. You know, just in case.

One of the people in the waiting area is a middle aged guy with a loud, projecting type of voice, wearing spandex shorts, going on about how many grams of salt are contained in various fast food items.
“Yeah, well the Subway veggie thing has three hundred something grams, less if you leave out the sauce”
My bullshittery, small talk tolerance level has been at an all-time low of late and I immediately try to zone out, to avoid getting wrapped into a discussion about sodium in Subway special sauces. The guy talking apparently knows many, if not ALL of the things, to be known ever in the history of the world; as evidenced by his precise quantification of ‘the Subway veggie thing’ and its verifiable ‘three hundred something grams’. I figure he must be a f@cking scientist.

He then pontificates off into a tirade about MSG and the ‘unproven’ slander conspiracy that says it is bad for you. According to him MSG is apparently totally harmless and is in fact the 5th flavour, the other four being: sweet, salt, sour, and spicy. I want to tell him that the 6^th flavour is actually shhh-sssssilence, but then I remember that I have no interest in getting involved.

Instead I focus on filling out the forms we are presented with to summarise the fitness and personal goals to be attained in cardiac rehab. Since I am really not sure what to expect, this gives me pause to wonder what “my goals” should actually be. I had explained to the nurse previously that my arm muscles recently felt very weak and floppy like the blue Muppet Grover, wavering and foam noodle like. Even when he is ‘Super Grover’ his arms are like cooked spaghetti. The only goal I could think of was that I simply wanted to find my strength again. Jellyfish were the most amorphous, floppy creatures I could conceive of so naturally I felt that the most succinct, all encompassing description was: ‘My Goal: to not be a jellyfish…‘ Once I wrote that down, from that moment on, I knew my workout was going to be amazing.

The sound of rubber grips on canes and walkers clicked and squeaked, rubbing against the tiles as participants made their way into a room filled with treadmills, stationary bikes, elliptical machines and rows of tiny colourful weights. A grey CD player on a corner shelf is playing Mambo #5 by Lou Bega (I had to Google who sang this ridiculousness and promptly got caught in the trap of watching the whole stupid video. Pure Evil with a catchy horn section). The CD starts to skip and nobody seems to notice, the nurse asks me to sit down so she can take my blood pressure. How did I slip into this parallel universe? Is this even real life?

The room is filled with the elderly and the infirm trying their best on machines that are clearly completely foreign to them. It is both sweet and sort of painful to watch. I feel like a bit of an impostor. I am almost immediately embarrassed and self-conscious of the pace I find easy to keep on the treadmill, compared to my fellow machine users flanking my sides, some with uneven, shaky steps and the pallor of oatmeal.

The AED defibrillator unit continues to chirp in the hallway outside. I make my way to the wall of ‘arm cycle’ machines. The Monarch “Rehab Trainer 881E” is reminiscent of a system echoing James Bond-esque style sleekness, circa Sean Connery days. These machines look ancient and a bit daunting.
“Yeash I can do thhish” I thought to myself, had a mental giggle and sat down to pedal away with my arms. An action that I feel certain is repeated in no other known human daily activity. It felt surprised at how great it was to get my arms moving. My sternum creaked and clicked a little but apparently that is fucking gross quite common. Is there no end to the disgusting after effects of OHS?

A young volunteer, who walks around assisting with taking blood pressure and tracking heart rates, tries to strike up some casual chit chat with me while he tracks my BP and HR when I am on the treadmill. It is a paper-thin line between wondering if I am being hit on or if he is just having a painfully awkward time trying to figure out why I am there. He eventually just outright asks what my condition was. I tell him I had my pulmonary valve replaced 5 weeks ago. This seemed to temporarily confuse and overwhelm him and he then asks, “So you like to exercise?”
“Sure” I patiently smiled and pulled my finger out of the heart rate monitor, to hopefully signal that I was done with the conversation.

The exercise sessions lasted about an hour and I was pleased with what I could do and humbled by what I found challenging. There is room for improvement and this Grover-armed jellyfish plans to do just that.
I passed the canary machine on the way out and was very relieved that it had chirped its way through a whole session and was not going to have to resuscitate anyone today.

See you again next week, you crazy, silly life situation.