Life Post-Dissection and Heart Attack

Sometimes it's hard to explain to people how my life is different than it was before my spontaneous dissection and heart attack.

Here's a few examples.

Every so often, I like to change things up -- get a new purse, get a new, different color or style of wallet, etc.

Before, I could make my choice solely on finding something I really liked.

Now, my wallet purchases are based primarily on whether my two stent cards, pictured below, will fit. If they don't fit, it doesn't matter how much I love the potential new wallet; it's not coming home with me:



The cards are laminated to preserve the information; thus, they don't fold up neatly to credit-card size.

Another thing. Before, if I was sick and wanted some chicken soup, I could just buy it at the store.

Side note: Cooking is not my forte and it's not something that I enjoy. I realize that other people do, but I've never been particularly good at it, and my repertoire of dishes that I make and that taste acceptable is fairly small.

But now, thanks to having to watch my sodium intake, eating a bowl of chicken soup is no longer a spur-of-the-moment whim--seriously, check out the sodium content on most soups, and remember to double the number because even the microwavable bowls are two servings. And recall that healthy sodium intake is 2,000 mg/day, ideally less. You can get that in a single bowl if you're not careful.

Healthy Choice's Chicken with Wild Rice is a typical offering in the microwave chicken soup category; if you eat the whole bowl, you're getting 900 mg of sodium in one sitting -- because honestly now, who eats just half the bowl? It's not like you can really save it.

This means that if I want soup, I have to make it myself, and let me express my gratitude to whoever it was who invented the slow cooker.

Last night I spent a couple of hours chopping up chicken breast, chopping assorted vegetables, cooking the chicken, then putting everything in the crock pot so that eight hours later, I have a big batch of low-sodium soup, like so:



I'm having a tooth pulled (back upper left molar) tomorrow, you see, and have been warned that I'll probably be eating soft foods for several days after. So instead of going to the store and buying several cans of soup, I spent part of my weekend making it from scratch.

Now maybe these are things that wouldn't upset the apple cart of your life--if you love cooking, and if you're less fickle than I am about your purses and wallets... and don't get me wrong, I don't sit around wringing my hands about my limited accessory choices or the fact that I have to do a lot more advance meal planning--it's just the way my life is now, and it's different--more complicated--than it was before.