fathers – Experience Has Made Me Rich

On the One Year Anniversary of my Heart Attack

So August 26th of this year marked the one year anniversary of my heart attack. I actually haven’t written a blog since the one I wrote about that day. That’s not as significant as it might sound – I have rough drafts for 3 different ones that I started but I’ve been busy with other things and haven’t devoted as much time to writing as I’d like (something I regret quite a bit). But for the anniversary of H-Day I thought it would be good to write an update on what has happened this past year. I don’t think a chronological narrative would make much sense, and besides, I don’t have that great a memory. So I’ll go with more of a stream of consciousness approach.

As you may know I am a high school math teacher. The heart attack happened exactly one week before the start of the 2014-2015 school year. Although many people couldn’t understand how or why I did it, I actually worked right from the first day of school. I certainly could have taken some more time to recover, but I didn’t feel I needed it that badly and the doctor said that if my job didn’t require heavy lifting and I felt okay there was no reason not to work. My reasoning for starting was that it was easier for everyone involved – students wouldn’t have to adjust to a new teacher twice, the school wouldn’t have to scramble to find someone to cover my classes and my colleagues wouldn’t have to worry about teaching more than their own course load. Now, almost a year later, I can say that the decision to start right away was neither good nor bad. If I had waited things would have been just as fine as if I had not. It’s funny how so many decisions in life seem important when they really are trivial. I took things easy at first and let my body tell me when I could ramp up, always erring on the side of caution. For example I took the elevator instead of the stairs for a couple of weeks, and kept my boardwork lower on the board (so as not to raise my right arm too high after the angio) for about a week.

One thing that I learned from my first follow-up with the cardiologist was that I have no “modifiable risk factors” for heart attack. Basically it’s good old genetics. I don’t drink or smoke. I have low cholesterol and low blood pressure. At the time of the heart attack I was overweight but by no means obese. I was keeping fit with heavy weights and regular though limited cardio. This was disturbing news – I mean it would be nice if I could just stop something I was doing and know I was preventing another heart attack, but as the cardiologist said, at least now I know. I had three partially and one fully blocked arteries, and except for one of the partials they were all stented. The one that was not stented is very small and doesn’t supply a large area, so that other arteries nearby can cover what it doesn’t manage. I am on a cholesterol medication that has been shown to prevent plaque buildup in arteries and even to slightly reduce existing plaque. I am hyper-aware of my heart so if anything does deteriorate I will be on it right away. In the meantime I decided to do everything I could do. As soon as I got the green light to resume exercising I began a cardio regimen of 45 minutes, 5 times per week. As of this moment, I have averaged exactly that. I say averaged because there were three weeks where I didn’t manage to get all 5 sessions in, but always compensated in succeeding weeks by adding sessions. Three different vacations didn’t keep me from my cardio. Some people tell me “Hey, you’re on vacation, give yourself a break.” My response is my heart doesn’t know I’m on vacation, there is no such thing as a break.

I also cleaned up my diet. Not that it was that terribly unclean to begin with. But I did eat a lot of red meat (3-4 times per week, sometimes more), and 2-3 times per week allowed myself cheat meals like KFC or Burger King, or just really decadent meals at restaurants. Now I eat only lean red meat, and only 1-2 times every month. I’d say over the past year I’ve probably had red meat about 15 times. My protein mainly comes from white meat chicken, fish, and some vegetarian sources like beans, quinoa, and nuts or nut butters. I eat very little fat, and almost no saturated fat. What fats I do eat come from the fish or chicken, or light salad dressing, which I use extremely sparingly. I don’t measure my food, but I never eat until I am stuffed. That’s also a change from before. For this entire year I have not felt stuffed even once. And I still eat a lot – probably 7-8 times each day. A lot of fruits, berries, vegetables and nuts fill out my diet.

So what the diet and cardio have done is resulted in fat loss. I spent my entire adult life struggling with fat loss – often successfully but not always. Each time the goal was fat loss. Now the goal is not that at all. The cardio and diet are to keep my heart healthy. The fat loss is a side effect, albeit a pleasant one. When I had the heart attack I weighed 225 lbs (down from an all time high of 245). Because I am a hobby bodybuilder that’s not as heavy as it sounds, but I was certainly carrying too much fat by an obvious margin. My weight this this morning was 189. I won’t lie and say that I’m ambivalent about that – I am overjoyed. But it wasn’t and isn’t the goal.

Speaking of exercise I also resumed lifting weights about 6 weeks after H-Day. This was with the doctor’s blessing. At first I kept things very light and let my body tell me when it was ok to go heavier, again always erring on the side of caution. I don’t remember the exact timeline but I’d say after about 3 months I was more or less back to pre-heart attack form. The weights and the fat loss are visually pleasing to me. Here are a few vanity photos of the impact this has had on my look.

I’d actually like to include a photo I took when I was 245 lbs but my computer is currently deciding I’m not allowed to look through old photos – thanks Windows 10.

The great news is that after the heart attack the cardiologist who saw me at the hospital said my heart was damaged (on a scale of 1 – 4 where 1 is the best, mine was a 2), but on my six-month follow up visit I had managed to return it to a level 1. The words of the cardiologist were “Except for the presence of the stents you have the heart of a healthy, athletic adult male with no sign of trauma.” And that, ladies and gentlemen, mattered profoundly more to me than how I look, although that is what people see.

Whenever you lose a lot of weight, or otherwise significantly change your look to something more aesthetic, people always want to know how you did it. The truth is I did it by having a heart attack. That flicked a switch in my mind that had never been flicked before. I no longer have a choice about eating well and exercising, which can read differently than I mean it. What I mean to say is that I know all to well what a struggle it is to have to make good decisions about healthy eating and exercise. To choose not to have a sundae and opt instead for the fruit salad. For me, now, the sundae is not a choice. Nobody is forcing me not to have it – it has been removed from the list of options by something outside my control. It’s actually pretty liberating. So my answer when people ask how I did it is to say “Well, step 1 is … you don’t want to do step 1.” Because Step 1 was have a heart attack. I didn’t decide to start looking better and then do something about it. I had a heart attack and this is how I am doing my best to prevent a repeat. I will say that I have had the odd dessert here and there. But each time I have done so it’s literally been a tiny forkful (as in just the tip of the fork) so I could taste it. The forkful concept would have seemed ridiculous to me a year ago. Now it is legitimately enough. I don’t have the forkful and then look longingly at the rest, wishing I could have more. The forkful does what I needed – it gives me the taste and that is enough. Once again this is not a choice I am making, or a philosophy I am forcing myself to embrace. It just is the way my brain works now – I didn’t deliberately activate it. If I did I would write a book about how. Another example is that there have been 4 times (no, I’m not counting I just remember them) when I have eaten one french fry at a meal. Because I wanted the taste.

Emotionally/psychologically it would be a lie to say I have not been affected. The day I had the heart attack one of the reasons I didn’t call an ambulance as soon as I should have is because I didn’t want to scare the kids. There’s no way around the fact that when your dad has a heart attack it’s scary. Same goes for my wife. The very last thing I want to do is scare them or have them worry. That said I am now hyper-aware of what is going on in my body, and especially my chest. And guess what? Chest pain happens, and it’s not generally a heart attack. Gas happens (especially because it is a side effect of some of the medication I am on). The pain can cause anxiety. Anxiety can cause chest pain. It’s a hilarity-filled ride. I can’t specifically recall how the heart attack itself felt – I just know it hurt but was not as intense as you’d think. I feel as though if it were happening again I would be sure. But I’m not sure if that’s true. So there are days when I find myself worrying. However with the cardio regimen I’m on I can always reassure myself that I wouldn’t be able to do 45 minutes of intense cardio without accompanying intense pain if I was actually having another heart attack.

On that note, when I started the cardio after the heart attack I was keeping my pulse rate in the 120’s, although my doctor did say I would be able to push it higher as I healed. As of today I usually use my elliptical machine (I have a gym in my basement although it has evolved since that blog about it), and the heart rate monitor I bought shows I’m keeping my heart rate in the 140-150 zone, which I made sure was ok with the cardiologist. Speaking of heart rate, I also take my blood pressure daily, and it stays in the 115/75 zone, with a resting heart rate of around 60 bpm.

One thing I have found recently (as in, the last 5 weeks or so) is that drawing is great therapy. It is extremely calming and does a great job of centering my thoughts. I highly recommend it. Another thing I’d have said if you’d asked me a year ago was that I can’t draw for beans. I never really believed I had any talent in that regard. But I have watched hours of YouTube tutorials and have been drawing every day. The therapeutic aspect can’t be overstated. It turns out when you practice something you also improve. Here is one of my earliest attempts at a portrait and one of my most recent ones. I’m no pro and may never be one, but the improvement is real and that’s only about a month. Therapeutic, fun, and inexpensive – I highly recommend it.

Wow. Ok this really has been stream of consciousness style. My writing is usually more organized than that. Ah well. This one wasn’t about writing, more about an anniversary summary. I admit I didn’t proofread that carefully either – forgive the errors. I am always happy to answer questions or offer assistance if I can. Leave me a comment and I will respond.

Thanks for reading,

Rich

Switch the Side, Switch the Sign?!!?

You can always judge my level of incredulity by my combination of punctuation. Two exclamation marks bookended by two question marks is a high level indeed. It’s the DEFCON 1 of incredulity. It comes from the way I’ve seen a lot of my students conditioned in algebra. It’s extremely sad. I’ll explain, but I have to start with a story about something that happened last week.

Thursday night I came home from play rehearsal and got the debrief about the household goings-on from my wife. Turns out my daughter, my 11-year old angel of happiness, was crying for something like 2 hours while I was gone. Dads out there with daughters (and I guess daughters with dads?) will know that there’s a special thing going on between dads and their girls. I think the best quote I ever read to describe it was this one:

“Certain is it that there is no kind of affection so purely angelic as of a father to a daughter. In love to our wives there is desire; to our sons, ambition; but to our daughters there is something which there are no words to express.”
– Joseph Addison

So when I find out that my daughter was so miserable, a part of me curls up in the fetal position and cries too. But you want to know what made it worse? What made it even more upsetting? The source of her pain was … algebra. Algebra! Her first algebra. A person’s first exposure to algebra should be special. It should be life-defining. It should be a cherished memory that warms you on command. A polished jewel of contentment forever residing at the center of your soul. And yet here’s my daughter, crying for 2 hours, and it was because of algebra. And I wasn’t home.

Talk about two ways to break my heart. Unacceptable!

So I dug a little deeper. My wife told me that my daughter was doing question after question, getting them right, and crying that she didn’t get it. My wife, no slouch in the math department for sure, was explaining the process, but for some reason it wasn’t getting through. My daughter just kept insisting she didn’t get it, all the while getting questions correct. How does this make sense? In what universe can a child keep getting questions right and through tears insist she doesn’t understand? The answer is because she was just following orders. The old “Switch the side, switch the sign” gambit. Consider this question she was working on:

x + 3 = 7

x = 7 – 3

x = 4

Correct, right? And easy too? So why was she so miserable?

It’s because she had no idea why she was doing what she was doing, or what any of it meant, and certainly no way to tell if her answer was right. She was right by accident, and because she was following a bunch of rules. In short, she wasn’t doing any math at all. She was, for all intents and purposes (or for all “intensive purposes” if you’re one of those people who hears sayings but never sees them written down) a trained monkey repeating a task. And nobody wants that … except for maybe the monkey because they get a lot of rewards for stuff like that … but no human wants that. And my daughter is exceedingly human.

You see, here’s what she was taught (or at the very least, to give her teacher the benefit of the doubt, it’s what she thought she was taught): To get the variable alone you have to move the number to the other side. If it’s plus you do minus and if it’s times you do divide. If it’s minus you do plus and if it’s divide you do times. Ouch. So much wrong with this I don’t even know how to start. But I do know that it’s taught this way so often that I have students who think that’s what algebra is. And I know of one teacher who used to have her students repeat the mantra “Switch the side, switch the sign.” I used to ask those students what they do if it’s multiplication or division. They said that’s when you don’t switch the sign. Ooooookay then.

So here’s the thing. When students are taught “rules” for solving equations they are not learning math. They are learning algorithms. An algorithm is a sequence of steps you follow to complete a specific task. You don’t need to know why, and in fact the reason algorithms are so powerful and so common is because you don’t need to know why. Long division is an excellent example. Many of us remember how to use long division to get the answer to 97654 divided by 7. But how many of us know why it works? The algorithm was designed to turn humans into calculators so that mathematicians didn’t have to do the tedious work. In WW1 there were literally rooms full of people – called calculators – who would do repetitive tedious calculations assigned to them by codebreakers. The codebreakers knew why the calculations were required, but the volume of work to do it was so vast that if the breakers themselves were to do the work they’d never decode a single message. So calculators were invented. They were people. A lot of them. And they were good at algorithms. But they didn’t know any math. Of course nowadays we have little computers that do the same job, but the concept is the same. A computer doesn’t think – it only follows instructions. It is excellent at executing algorithms. BUT THAT ISN’T MATH!!!

Ok. Back to the algebra, and my daughter. Saturday morning we were sitting in the family room, still in our pajamas, and Phineas and Ferb had just ended. The time was right. I told her I was going to help her with algebra but first she needed to forget everything she’d learned thus far. She happily agreed and put the misery in some invisible incinerator. Ahhh. Square one. Then we had this conversation:

Me: “Imagine I split your class up into groups of 2. Pick a partner.”
Her: “Alyssa!” (this was meant to be obvious to me)
Me: “Ok, now every pair has to pick one person for the blue team and one for the red.” (blue is her favourite colour – I’m not a rookie)
Her: “Blue!”
Me: “Ok, we’re going to play a game. Blue team goes first. Here’s the game. Pick a number but not a hard one. Don’t tell red team what it is. Now your job is to give Alyssa one hint, and if she gets it right you both get a point. Otherwise nobody scores.” (yeah, lame game, I know – but there are points and a blue team so she’s right on board)
Her: “Ok. My hint is it’s my favourite number.” (I saw this coming a mile away, and had a plan)
Me: “Right, Ok. But here’s the thing. You want to be SURE Alyssa will get it right. What if she can’t remember what your favourite number is? You want to give her a clue that will work for sure. And no using your number in the clue!”
Her: “It’s my birthday.” (Ha! I saw that coming too)
Me: “What if Alyssa forgot your birthday?”
Her: “How could she? She’s coming to my party!”
Me: “Good point. But what if she thinks your birthday is on a different day than the party? After all it is. You want to be sure she’ll guess your number, so make the hint foolproof.”
Her: “Ok, I get it. My hint is my number is 5 less than 10.”
Me: “Awesome! Ok, I’m Alyssa. Is it 5?”
Her: “You knew that already because you know my favourite number.”
Me: “Good point. Ok, here, it’s red team’s turn. If you increase my number by 7 you get 12.”
Her: “Hey you can’t pick the same number as me!” (Success!!!!)
Me: “Yes I can I can pick any number I want. Ok your turn.”
Her: “If you cut my number in half you get 10” (ooooh, nice one)
Me: “20?”
Her: “Yes! Ok, give me one now!”
Me: “If you multiply my number by 2 and then add 1, you get 13.”
Her: “6?”
Me: “6? Why 6?”
Her: “Because 6 x 2 is 12 and 12 + 1 is 13.”
Me: “Nice! Ok, you go.”
Her: “If you add 67354 to my number you get 90543.”
Me: “Ummm, are you going to know if I got it right?”
Her: “No. But you always get it right so I want to know the answer.” (Love her – I always get it right? She needs to talk to my wife!)
Me: “How am I supposed to get it? Those numbers are huge!”
Her: “Just do 90543 minus 67354!”
Me: “Right. I knew that. Ok it’s 23189.” (I rock at doing subtraction in my head – blows her away every time – she checked with a calculator)
Her: “Yes. Nice one Daddy.”

This went on for a long time. She really liked the game. At some point she realized that I was not keeping score and she got mad at me. Then she realized that it would always be a tie so she said it was not a good points system. We spent some time coming up with a better points system. She came up with something. It was fairly convoluted and had to do with blue team’s ability to do an aerial cartwheel so I lost, but I’m comfortable with that.

Then I told her a story about a dude from a long time ago named al-Khwarizmi, who wrote a book called “Al-Kitāb al-mukhtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-jabr wa-l-muqābala“ (no, I don’t have the name of the book memorized – I always have to look it up – but I always know the al-Jabr part). I said the name of the book is a pain to say so a lot of people just called it al-Jabr. I told her that al-Khwarizmi’s book was all about ways to answer questions like the one in the game if you were not good enough to do it in your head. Take for example the clue

“If you increase my number by 7 you get 12”

al-K (that’s what his peeps called him I bet) would have said the clue slightly differently. He would have said

“Suppose thing, increased by 7 ducats, results in 12 ducats.” (take a moment to explain that ducats are kind of like dollars)

Then he would have said that you can solve it by reversing the increase, and conclude

“Therefore thing is 12 ducats reduced by 7 ducats, which is to say 5 ducats”

Then we did a few that way. I’d write “Thing, multiplied by 6, results in 18 ducats” and she’d write “Therefore thing is 18 divided by 6, which is to say 3 ducats.”

Now some people might not believe that you can ask and expect an 11-year old to use language like this, but I’ve never understood why people would think that. Speak to them this way and they will listen, understand, and respond in kind. It’s what we’re wired to do. It’s how we learn to communicate.

I should mention that at one point she asked me if al-K called his book al-Jabr because it sounds like algebra. I told her that algebra sounds like al-Jabr because of that book! That al-K invented algebra. She thought that was super cool but also wanted to know how I could know such a thing. She was amazed to find out that I studied some history in my life. Daddy points scored.

Ok. So this gets tedious right? My daughter agreed. It’s too much writing. So then I told her about a dude named Rene Descartes who really liked al-K’s methods, but was too lazy to write it all out that way. So he’d look at the sentence

“Suppose thing, increased by 7 ducats, results in 12 ducats.”

And he’d say for example that “thing” is too many letters to write, but it’s important since it’s the number we’re trying to get people to guess. So Descartes chose the minimum number of letters possible. One. I let her choose the letter. She chose “m”. She always chooses “m” when letter-choosing is the task at hand. Then I told her that “increased by” is a pain to write out also, and asked her what she thought Descartes would say instead. She wrote down “+”. Then I said what’s “results in”? She wrote “=”. And Voila! She had written

m + 7 = 12

Then without me saying anything else, she said “Oh, so then Descartes would write m = 12 – 7! Which is 5!”.

And honestly, with that the lesson was done. I gave her about 8 more equations to solve in the Descartes style, and she got them all. We never once discussed rules, and we never once switched a bloody sign.

And there were no tears.

Maybe I’ve rescued the algebra memory.

Thanks for reading,

Rich