I’m telling you this because one of the things that the surgeon told us was that the, one of the things that I wanted to know from the surgeon was how many of these things had he done. Was he, sort of, did he know what he was doing and he told me, this was September, he told me by that time he had done about 140 bypass operations that year.

So that was you know, quite reassuring. And I also asked him what the prognosis was and he told me that 95% of all cases of, who have bypass surgery are successful, and 5% are not. So you’ve got a 1 in 20, is it? yes 1 in 20 chance that something might go wrong and I said what can go wrong.

He said mostly what can go wrong is that you get some kind of sepsis and we can fix that. So I thought the odds were pretty good, bearing in mind that my cardiologist said I’ve got to have this done, not much choice.

Before I was discharged the physiotherapist took me to the gym down stairs and in the gym there were a number of people doing various exercises and she said they were all ex-patients who had bypass operations and I was, you know, I was pretty impressed. You know, they were doing, they were jumping up and down and they were doing skipping, and they were doing a mild form of press-ups.

A number of fairly strenuous looking things and I thought, oh well it must have been two or three years since they’ve had their bypass and I asked her about that and she said, turned to one of the chaps and she said ‘How long ago have you had your bypass?’ and he said, ‘Oh, just six weeks ago now.

So that was, that was a real eye opener and again something very positive. And really from that moment on I felt, and my wife, we both felt very positive about the whole thing.

It came to mind the other day that I taught my wife to cycle, I taught both our children to cycle. I taught all our grandchildren to cycle except the youngest one whose now, hes a latecomer, hes now eight and he still can’t cycle.

And I can’t, you know I can’t sort of run round with him with a bike bending double to hold his saddle. So that’s a regret, I can’t do that. But, and I can’t play football with him.

My wife was obviously very, very concerned and the mere fact that she was told I had a heart attack, made her believe I was next to death’s door. And to bring her round to believing that there isn’t, you know, you can make a very good recovery was a real, a real benefit, not only to her but to, to me as well.

I mean, even now she occasionally says ‘oh don’t lift this or don’t do that. I say, ‘come on I do twenty five press ups, I weigh 75 kilos, what am I doing here, lifting 20 kilos, you know. So it’s a big worry and even, I’m, I have a lot of medication, blood pressure and a number of things which fortunately don’t seem to result in any side effects which is a big plus and her, she sees it as her function in life to make sure that I take it.

And I do naturally take it in the morning, I take some in the morning as part of my usual routine, shaving and, yes I do shave, and cleaning teeth and so on, and in the evening when we have supper, except then I sometimes forget, but she doesn’t [laughs].