A long time ago, in a hospital not so far way…

The hospital room seemed a little more dimly lit than usual when the two doctors entered my room in the CardioVascular Center at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, in the evening of July 7th, 2015.  I was resting comfortably in the  hospital bed with multiple lines of support attached, holding my wife’s hand.

TODAY…

I am about to give you a real, true, honest-to-goodness account of how I came back from my death bed and gained back 30 pounds of muscle.

Gaining 30 pounds of my muscle back was done without the use of performance enhancing drugs of any type, except caffeine, and while being treated with a variety of medications for heart failure.  Any photos or videos you see of me are completely raw (no PhotoShop, filters, or editing tricks to make me look better/worse than reality).  There will be no fake fitness in the context of these posts, only real data that hopefully you can use to your benefit.

On July 8th, 2018, I celebrated my 3 year anniversary of what I like to call “staying on the planet”.  July 8^th 2018 marked 3 years since I had triple bypass surgery, I procedure the doctors call CABG: Coronary Artery Bypass Graft(s).  I celebrated by performing the following workout:

Day 1A: Quads, Calves, Core (actual workout notes)
Quads:
A1: Reverse hyper;
light band doubled 6×3
A2: Front squat w/ 5 sec pause in hole, 2 RM (rep max)
45,70,95,120,145,170,195,220×2
250x 1 Miss 2, dropset to
145×3-5, 95×5-7, bwx8-10, sissy squats x 15-20
2nd round 245×2, dropset
3rd round 245×2,dropset

B: Leg extensions 5 RM to dropset, 2 rounds

C: Leg curls 5-7 RM to dropset, 2 rounds

Calves:
D1: Standing med, 20-25 reps
D2: standing wide, 20-25 reps
D3: standing narrow, 20-25 reps
D4: donkey calves raises 20-25 reps
rest 2 mins
repeat twice

E: Drills: Slide & Drag + Shrug, 5 RM to dropset
205×5, 240×5, 275×5,
295×5, dropset to upright row 115×7-9,
dropset to upright row 70×8-10
3 rounds

F: Decline Situps, 20RM
Dropset to leg raises
2 rounds

G: Speed Walk (@park) 1.42 miles – time 17:24

I didn’t begin the road to recovery with an advanced workout like this, but this is a good example of where I am at currently in terms of training.

The story of how I ended up in a hospital bed at Tuft’s recovering from triple bypass surgery, or triple CABG (Coronary Artery Bypass Graft(s)),

is a long one.  This post is the first of a series of posts about exactly how I gained my muscle back, going from 195 pounds to 225 pounds in six months.  It is important to note, however, that I spent much more time lying in bed in the hospital than your typical CABG patient.  Lucky me had a rare, but serious post-surgical event – a blood clot in my heart just 2 days after returning home from Tufts (the first time).  Fortunately, my nephew Raymond was staying at my house to help my wife, Katie, ease my recovery post-CABG.  Two days after returning home from Tuft’s and almost exactly 1 week after my CABG, I woke up in the middle of night thinking I needed to use the bathroom, but paused, sitting on the edge of our bed.

“What are you doing?”, Katie asked, waking up and noticing me sitting there strangely, in the dark.

“Something’s wrong…”, I replied.

After that, I don’t remember much of what happened.   According to Katie and my nephew, who had to apply his wrestling skills to prevent me from flailing, I went into some sort of seizure.  Except for flashes of images here and there, the next thing I remember is waking up in Lowell General Hospital.  After placing a couple more stints in my heart, they shipped me back to Tufts (at my request).  After spending nearly another week lying on my back, I went home again.

That pretty much sums up the month of July 2015.  So, let’s look at August 2015.

On my second return home, I was in pretty rough shape.  My body had cannibalized about 30 pounds of my muscle.  I stepped on my home scale and just couldn’t believe it.  It read 195 lbs.  I had not weighed under 209 pounds since 1991.  At 6’1″, 195 lbs,  I was THIN, to put it nicely.  To put it another way, I looked like I’d been using heroin and not eating for about 2 years.

The makers of The Walking Dead called, checking to see if I’d like to make a cameo appearance (not really).  I thought of Beauty and the Beast, and considered breaking every reflective surface in my home.  I remember standing in the shower, tracing with my fingers the 12 inch scar running from my clavicular notch to my diaphragm,

feeling the knots in the metal wire used for my sternum repair post-CABG, and feeling humiliated, betrayed, defeated… and angry.

 

In addition to looking sickly and frail, I was in pretty serious pain.  Pain so severe that pain meds were needed just to function.  The problem with pain meds is some of them make you STUPID.  One pain med in particular, Dilaudid (Hydromorphone HCl), was compromising my ability to think clearly and operate normally.  I’d rather be in pain than be stupid.  The breaking point was when I was trying to work at my computer and I could not type.  Normally, I can type using home row, not looking at the keyboard, at about 40 words/minute.  With the Dilaudid in my system, I was reduced to hunt and peck, and STILL making mistakes.  Katie, was there at this particular time, helping me get some work done.  She remembers how infuriated I became at this loss of function.  Consequently, only 4 weeks after my second set of surgeries, I took myself off Dilaudid and made due with OTC Extra Strength Tylenol and coffee.  Coffee, strangely enough, did also noticeably reduce my pain levels.  These measures gave me the ability to work (and think!) again.

In the first 4 weeks of my recovery, my only real exercise was walking around my townhouse.  Because they literally saw your sternum in half to be able to access your heart and make the bypasses to the arteries of the heart, post-CABG patients are instructed NOT to drive a car for 6 weeks.  This is an item they stress.  The jolt of even a minor fender bender is enough to pop the sternum apart.  My surgeon asked me if I have ever used Super-Glue to glue any item back together;

“Sure”, I answered.

“What happens if your try to use that item too soon?”, he asked, “Does it come back apart?”

“Of course”, I said.

“What happens if you try to Super-Glue those same pieces back together again?”, he continued.

“It just doesn’t work”, I said.

 

“Right.  That’s what it’s like trying to repair your sternum a second time”, he said, looking me dead in the eye.  “Get it?”

“Got it.  No driving”. I replied, somewhat horrified.  My surgeon looked pleased at my reaction.

So, no driving.  Which means I was more or less confined to my home, the majority of the time.  I was really too weak to go anywhere anyway.  Four weeks was the longest time I had taken off from lifting weights since my Junior year in high school when I took 3 months off lifting to improve at running for playing soccer.  Still, I knew if I wanted to heal, I needed to start moving.  At this point in my life, I feel like I could easily write a book on how to rehabilitate injuries.  Although some injuries certainly require surgical intervention, many injuries can be completely rehabilitated by applying the appropriate measures.

The necessary elements of successful rehabilitation are simple;

1. Physical measures: Constructive, consistent blood flow delivered both actively and passively in a frequency proportional to the intensity of the application.  I know this sounds complicated.  It’s not.  I will put this critical element in more practical terms in the upcoming parts of this blog post series.  Thank you for your patience.
2. Nutritional and dietary measures: You must provide the body with the necessary nutrients to effect repair and restoration of function. There is an pervasive misunderstanding of nutrition.  Most would assume proteins are the most critical component of restoration, but the fact is that too much protein can hinder healing, not facilitate it.  Additionally, sugars (carbohydrates) actually tend to suppress immune function.  The key macro-nutrient in rehabilitation is FAT.
3. Rest and recovery measures: Sleep and stress must be managed to promote healing and the re-invigoration of your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual energies.

I started the physical element of my rehabilitation with one of the only things I could do – walking.  I set up a small walking route in the 3rd floor of my townhouse consisting of a hassock in the second bedroom and a laundry basket in the master bedroom.  I would walk from the master into the hall, then into the second bedroom, around the hassock, back to the hall, into the master, around the laundry basket, and repeat.  Basically, figure-eighting at the best walking speed I could manage.  At first I would do 10 minutes of walking at a time, twice per day.  Then, 15 minutes twice per day.  Then, 20 minutes twice per day.  In this first 4 weeks, I also started some basic exercises with a 5 pound dumbbell that I bought on Amazon.  I actually placed the order for this dumbbell on July 27th, 2015, in anticipation of my rehab.  Single arm presses, single arm rows, single arm curls,  and single arm extensions.  At first, I was stunned by how heavy 5 pounds felt.  Then, I was just plain angry, or “salty” as my nephew Raymond likes to put it.  Anger.  My default emotion – which is at least 30% of what landed me on the surgeon’s table in the first place.  Another big contributing factor that led to the blockages in my heart was inflammation.

There are 4 factors that lead to cardiovascular disease;

1. stress
2. sugar
3. inflammation
4. peroxidation

In the 10-15 years leading up to 2015, I had chronic levels of at least 3 out of 4.  The largest contributing factor to heart disease, for me, being inflammation.  I had an untreated gluten allergy since the 70’s and my body was in a constant state of inflammation because of that.  Over many years of denial and dismissal, my allergy to gluten was literally destroying the inside of my body.  By 2014, I was finally properly diagnosed and promptly went 100% gluten free.  In late 2014, in roughly 30 days, I went from approximately 232lbs to 220lbs, shedding approximately 12 pounds of water (inflammation), lost half a shoe size (12 to 11.5), and for the first time in at least a decade, could see the outlines of the metatarsal bones on the top of my feet.  They were previously not visible because of the amount of swelling in my feet and ankles.


But the damage had already been done, and there was no reversing the damage to my cardiovascular system before disaster occurred.

But, let’s get back to my rehab…

It occurred to me early on that the exercise phases of my rehabilitation would mirror my evolution as a lifter.

Serendipitous symmetries and eerily familiar congruities began to materialize during my extended 2 year rehabilitation.  Similar to when I was 12 years old and spent a large proportion of my time confined to my 8 foot by 8 foot bedroom and began my weight training career with a 21 pound dumbbell, I was now, 32 years later, mostly confined to my townhouse with a 5 pound and a 10 pound dumbbell.

Phases of my lifting career:

1. The Single Dumbbell
2. The Rocky Workouts
3. Arnold’s High Volume Approach
4. Dropsets Galore and Egg Whites
5. The Science of Charles Poliquin
6. Dan Duchaine and Body Opus
7. The Genius of Louie Simmons
8. Snatch 300
9. Comprehensive Rehab

In the next post of this series, I will give a detailed explanation of my first rehab workouts with weights at EDGE, beginning with as little as 5 pound dumbbells.  I will also talk about the nutritional tactics I used and OTC supplements I tried.

Thank you for reading.

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