So you were at home, how long did you spend at home before you felt right I’m fit enough to go back to work and…?

Well there is a period where they say that you should not go to work for three months after the op, which I adhered to. But I felt, well what I did basically was I could have, the last month if I was paid fully forever, I could have lived like that. I’d go to the mountains, with the dog, during the morning, get home, pick the children up from school and get the tea ready for my wife when she came home from work. But unfortunately we got to pay the bills, so I had to come back to work but… No, I was good. I was still getting on, going to talk with my GP, the cardiac nurse came to see me twice and said well I don’t need to see you again actually, you’re doing remarkably well.

I think they will want me to, I think they’ll be wanting, trying to getting me to do something but, I know they’re gonna be quite concerned about coming out [to see me at home] because the last time anyone seen me from work I was in Intensive Care. So although I’ve like communicated with them on the phone and I’ve written to different people, they’re gonna be like not know what to really expect. Maybe when they see me they’re gonna be thinking, theres nothing wrong with her, she can go back now. I think maybe a coupla days might –

Yeah, is there anything you could do at home or it’s not that kind of work?

No. It’s mainly visiting people and being out and stuff so. It’s a lot of, it’s a lot of getting round, I work as a Housing Officer for a Housing Trust. And so it’s a lot of like going to peoples houses, or go in flats and up and down the stairs and stuff. So you’re out, in out of your car, like twenty visits a day. I just don’t think I could do that right now.

Sounds like quite a lot?

It’s quite physical and it’s about being on the ball as well ’cause you’re dealing with people who, you’re not seeing anyone for anything happy or good or for them to say this is great. They all want to moan about something. So they all want you to sort something out, so it’s quite stressful in that way, but I wanna be back, I just don’t wanna rush back.

And all the time I’d been working part-time before I got ill and I was signed off sick for well, until Christmas because it took me that long to kind of get strong enough. But my GP was very supportive in saying, “You know you’re not well enough to go back to work until you’re well enough to kind of manage at home. You know you’re not getting well enough to go back to work and not be able to look after your daughter.” So he was really supportive in kind of prioritising that first. And then by the time Christmas came I actually decided, you know, I probably would have been strong enough to go back to work and work was very supportive about saying you know you can come back a day a week and well build it up from there but there was a redundancy offer on the table. And I actually decided that I needed just to kind of spend some time with my daughter and spend a good chunk of time being well with her rather than being ill with her. So I didn’t go back.

The forms of ageism that you come up again is endemic at work as well. So you kind of, you think, you’re always, in my job there are very few people of my age group, there are very few. If I count them, out of 200 odd, I can count them on one hand. Because you need to be pretty quick-witted, work quickly, everything, it’s a high level of stress. Everything has to be accurate, precise, obviously because it’s banking, can’t afford to make mistakes. And theres a lot of pressure in answering the calls and so on and so forth. So it’s a high-stress environment. Working at night doesn’t help because you have the sleep deprivation. And I really seriously wondered whether I’d be able to function again;

And it was also, because I work with younger people, you’re always having to make certain that you are as good, as fast, as quick and as responsive, as quickly as they are. And I didn’t feel that I was. And I really wondered whether I’d be able ever, seriously ever to get back to that again. And I really lost huge confidence.

I went to see my GP. Fortunately my company had been in touch with my GP and my GP had spoken to the company secretary and they were in agreement that going back part-time for this amount of time would be acceptable though I think they had a time limit set on me. That was probably by the board of directors. Anyway, I saw the doctor and said that I’d reached my maximum, four hours a day. She suggested that I done four hours a day for a couple or three weeks and then try to go up to the five which I did and yes she was right. Within two weeks I got used to the four and I was ready for the five-hour day. So I did, I went to the five-hour day and the company secretary and the MD said they wanted to see me just an update and how I was coping etc. but I think I had, I’d had about three or four meetings with them during my period of re-education.

And I went in and saw the MD and the company secretary. The MD had said to me that if my six months of sickness was up on the last Saturday and I think this was about a Wednesday I was seeing them, and what he was going to do was look at my annual salary and equate it to an hourly rate and then pay me for the hours I was there. And this I found very obnoxious. I thought they had my interest at heart. I’d done 43 years for this company and here they were talking of cutting my money and making me suffer. There was also the fact that I didn’t need this. There were so many things happening in my life, so many things happening different in my life, trying to adjust to work. Trying to remember peoples names and things of this nature, I did not want this added worry.

But I took on board what he said and I think, I know definitely the following Monday was the first time I went back on 8 hours. I done 8 hours and I never looked back. I went on to do a 39-hour week. I am now doing probably a 44/45-hour week. He obviously regretted what hed said because the company secretary approached me and said, if I could maintain a 30-hour week they wouldn’t dock my money. Well to my mind I wasn’t far off it. I was doing a five-hour day. That equates to 25 hours a week. I was only five hours lacking and I did do work part of my lunch hour so I was only a couple of hours short of what they demanded. To my mind it was unnecessary. It was added hassle I didn’t need but, looking back, it was a challenge. And I always rose to a challenge and they didn’t beat me. I beat them. It was probably one of the best things to happen in my life in reflection because it encouraged me to try and get a grip of more of my life as it was.

So everybody learnt something and we decided that we couldn’t not do anything about it, that we would have to make some changes as a unit. And it was simple things that I could tell them, it was things like you don’t have any conception of time. It could be day, it could be night, it could be the middle of the afternoon, as a patient you don’t know, because the lights are on all night, the lights are on all day. Theres activity all night and theres activity all day. So I didn’t, half the time I didn’t know what time it was, so there were clocks placed everywhere where patients could see them.

Even down to things like bin lids, when people put their foot on the pedal of the bin and the bin crashes down and you’re just dropping off to sleep and, you know, you already think you’re in a strange environment, that you’ve been abducted like by aliens and then this thing comes crashing down. So they changed all the bins so that the bin lids came down very slowly and they didn’t crash. We did a booklet for patients who were going to be part of the follow-up clinic, which describes the things that they would go through, about the nightmares, about the pains and the aches, and loss of appetite and loss of concentration, all those kind of things. So myself and the follow-up nurse, we did a booklet for patients, the follow-up team has since been further developed.

The other thing that we changed was weve decided that, I found it quite hard going from the Intensive Care Unit to the ward, so they decided to step patients level of care down, so that some of the monitoring would be reduced gradually before patients went to the ward so that it wouldn’t be such a shock to go from one extreme to another.