Recovery from open heart surgery is hard. While still in the hospital I could barely walk 100 ft without getting tired and out of breath.

Today I walk for 30 minutes straight but I that's indoors and on level ground. I'll find a big store and walk around the store for 30 minutes to get back into shape. It's slow but I am making progress. My heart function is still no where like it was before my three heart attacks.

I had one heart attack that never was diagnosed until the surgeon opened up my chest to fix 4 blocked heart arteries. He told me verbally that he saw evidence of two previous minor heart attack.

I remember the day I had the first really sever chest pains but failed to realize that I was having a heart attack. Evidently it only did minor damage to my heart muscle. I suspect that was back around 2003/4 sometime but can't remember the exact time. All I know is that I about crumpled over with pain in my chest. I thought it was pleurisy and that it would go away. Well it lasted ( was painful) for two days almost before the pain stopped. By then part of my heart muscle had died. Now I use to get out and get around and was pretty athletic playing ice hockey. But I noticed that I was getting tired easily and it was getting harder and harder to motivate my self to get out and cut the grass. I found that my arms got really tired just raising them up to wash my hair. I knew that something was not right but I figured that I was just out of shape. I figured that I could someday start a walking and exercise program to get back into shape and even get back into ice skating someday. Well that never happened. I had the Big one on March 2nd 2009. I spent a week in the hospital just recovering so that I could have the open heart operation. They did that on March 12th. I spent the next 11 days in INTENSIVE Care trying to recover from the surgery. They gave me great care at Deaconess Hospital and my surgeon did his job well. If it didn't hurt so much afterward I'd let him operate on me again. hehe. Well the next 30 days I spent in the step down cardiac care unit until I was finally discharged on April 7th. It's taken several more months to get back to my old self. But I'll never be the same again. I want to do a few things before the old heart gives out someday.

Dec 23rd I went ahead and ordered a new solid steel trigger guard for my old Remington Model 660 222 rifle. It should be in in a few more days and then I'll install it myself.

I tried to get Bob the gunsmith at Gander Mountain to sell one to me and install it on my rifle but he told me to go to the Remington web site and find a dealer that sells them on line. So that's what I did. The old plastic trigger guard is warped badly and doesn't hold the metal spring in place. So soon I'll be installing the new METAL trigger guard. I hope it fits right the first time. I'll have to wait and see.

Then I'll take this gun to the range and site the scope in. I have two laser bore sighting devices that I'll be able to choose from to do this job.

I started walking outside this last month and took my Garmin eTrex Vista GPS with me to time my walks. The VISTA GPS tells me how fast I am walking, the max speed and the average speed. It tells me my average moving speed and stopped time. So it knows when I am walking and when I stop to rest. So far I was able to walk about 2.5 miles which I felt was good.

I hope to work on my walking program and slowly get my heart muscle and lungs stronger. I don't the lung capacity that I had as a youth as it's about 1/4 the capacity as it was 15 years ago.

Thankfully I stopped smoking in 1993 and I think that helped save my life. I would have been dead right now if I has been still smoking cigarettes.

Believe me when they saw your breast bone in half it's a wake up call.

My old next door neighbor who is 3 years younger than me almost had a heart attack. He went to the hospital with chest pains and they were able to unblock his heart artery before his heart muscle died. They did a cardiac cauterization on him and found the blockage and fixed it with a stent. Now he carries Nitroglycerin tablets with him and still goes out duck hunting with his brothers. I too had the same procedure only they said that I was not able to get the stint but had to have bypass surgery on my heart. They also repaired my mistral valve and did a MAZE procedure on me to stop me from having Atrial Fibrillation. AF can kill. The procedure was successful and I don't have to take medicine for AF anymore. Thank god. I have to take other meds for my high blood pressure and diabetes. Luckily I got the diabetes under control and am not really a diabetic. My long term blood sugar tests are normal now and so is my other blood sugar tests. Having open heart surgery can create so much stress on the body that it can cause you to have high blood sugar levels for a while. After you recover the blood sugar levels go back to normal.

So I look forward to doing some hunting n the future. I am only two years behind schedule now. LOL