Enjoying water from tiny airplane package.

My wife and I just got back from a 2 week vacation to India and to Dubai, U.A.E! We had a great time, going to my cousin’s wedding, visiting my relatives, and sightseeing.

It’s been three months since my bypass surgery, and my whole life since then has been pretty much exclusively focused on coping with this new situation – the new situation of having diabetes and heart disease.

It’s a heavy pill to swallow overnight. I must say that I feel like I have rose up to the challenge and handled things as well as I could have.

My wife and I have become very knowledgeable about healthy eating and exercise, and we both have lost 30+ pounds each. It’s been quite a journey – emotionally, physically, and spiritually.

I can always feel the presence of my 7 inch chest wound which I’ve decided to name Frank so that when I complain about the stinging I don’t have to continually say “My chest wound is stinging” to my wife. Now I can just say that Frank is up to no good.

Anyway… why cousin was going to get married in January and I was planning on visiting India. Well, it happened that I had this little thing called bypass surgery in October, so India seemed out of the question. The surgery was very difficult for me and recovering was also quite intense and life-changing.

I found that I could no longer could think about anything else other than my own mortality and my illnesses. It was hard to move, I couldn’t eat the things I used to like, I had to get used to all the new medications I was taking… In short, traveling halfway around the globe seemed incomprehensible and out of the question. I barely gave it a second thought. I could barely turn in bed, let alone fly around the planet!

But day by day, week by week, I started improving. I increased aerobic exercise by about 10 minutes a week. I started at 10 minutes a day. I worked up to almost 45 minutes a day.

When I first started walking on the treadmill, I remember that 1.6 miles per hour was fast for me. You would be surprised at how slow that really is (for a normal 34 year old, that is).

I thought is was quite a triumph the day I did a 45 minute workout on an elliptical machine. I certainly had come a long way, much further than I ever thought I could or would do.

After surgery, I was so weak that I never thought I would be able to lead a normal life again. I suddenly found myself in better shape than I was in before the surgery. I felt more vibrant, more enthusiastic, and energetic than I had for many years prior.

My cardiac rehab, which I remember just starting, was soon ending for me. I had watched others ‘graduate’ from cardiac rehab the weeks before I did. Finally, it was my turn. I was 30 pounds lighter than I was when I started. I was walking 2 miles an hour faster than I was when I started, and I was walking uphill now.

Suddenly, I found myself ready to go to India. My wife and I got our bags ready, our clothes ready, and off we were.

For the first time since my surgery, the focus was no longer on my surgery, was no longer on my illnesss. The focus was no longer on me.

All of a sudden, we were literally flown away from our little world of work, and exercise, and nutrition, and disease. Now we were flying 30,000 feet above sea level, moving at 500 miles per hour, drinking from tiny plastic containers of mineral water, watching in-flight movies, and flying over the Atlantic Ocean.

It was great! We were on an adventure and I was completely distracted from my usual thoughts of my illness and my future. Although I was reminded of Frank – he was quite vocal about the 20 hour journey to India – the concern was replaced by excitement. Excitement of seeing a foreign country and experiencing a different world and culture far removed from our own, here in the States.

I remembered what it was to be young again.  I stopped feeling like a feeble and old young-man.  Now I was more concerned about getting through immigration and customs, finding all of our baggages, and trying to speak in broken Hindi and finding my uncle who came to pick us up at Mumbai.  We arrived at my uncle’s house at 4am completely exhausted and full of excitement at our coming 8 days of adventure.

Although it was a relief to have mentally escaped my “health-prison”, in reality, I could not escape it completely.  It suddenly became glaringly obvious that keeping up my strict nutrition goals was going to be very unrealistic. From the very beginning of the voyage, the in-flight food was oily, sugary, completely devoid of whole grains… In short, exactly what I probably should not have been eating.

My months of educating myself and eating well suddenly came to an important test – could I stay even relatively healthy while on vacation?

I’m sure many people have had this question on their travels. This was a first for me.

Prior to my surgery, I had no troubles with it – I simply ate whatever I wanted whenever I wanted… But that’s what got me into this problem in the first place.

I no longer had that freedom. I don’t think I ever really had the freedom… I was just walking on the edge of a cliff, but I refused to look over the edge.

I made the best choices I could with what I had. I suppose that if I really wanted to, I could have insisted on eating very healthy foods and carried around my own food with me to the wedding and all the functions and to my relatives’ houses that I visited.  I could have carried my own burlap sack of barley and whole wheat, dry beans, and legumes to protect myself from the ravishes of unhealthy food, but I really wasn’t ready for that.

When travelling to visit relatives in India, food is always present. When you visit someone’s home, tea is always offered – which, is usually made with whole milk and sugar. Cookies, and various snacks, and dense sweets made with lots of cream and butter are constantly offered. It’s hard to stay way from these things.

The only thing I truly had control over, was how much food I put in my mouth. I made it a point to eat as little as I could. I decided to never gorge myself and to stop as soon as my hunger was gone.

After 10 days of travel, I walked into my house, and within 5 minutes I stepped on the scale. It was a moment of great intrigue, great suspense! What would it be? I knew I had eaten quite a bit worse than I was before I left. Although I was eating worse while travelling, I was still eating much better than I was before my surgery.  What I now considered to be bad was infinitely better than my previous diet.

Did I gain a lot of weight? What would the scale tell me?

I gained two pounds.

Not bad. Not great… but not bad.

I’ve been home now for about a week, and I’ve dropped another 2 pounds, so I’m back to where I started.

Overall, a success!