My Heart Attack Turned Me Into A Photographer

I've written next to nothing since the election result. Which is fine. But I have been taking pictures in the woods every day. 

I started taking pictures of the trees and nature in the woods after they helped me get better. I'd had what at the time felt like a mini cardiac arrest, induced by the constant chain smoking of cigarettes long into the earlier hours, fuelling my while writing and chess playing, sometimes for up to 3 days without sleep or any exercise to ameliorate the negative impacts.

Then one night I was overcome by peculiar bodily sensations. Nodes. Individuals points started presenting across the top of my chest which felt like blockages. Blocked arteries desperately gasping for clean air they could breath.The number of nodes grew and spread across my chest. My ability to exhale was suddenly capped to a minimum, as was my maximum intake of air.

Then my torso felt as though it too had become riddled with these nodes, these blockages, that now restricted my physical mobility; issuing darting spiky pains like pulled muscles whenever  a shift in movements transgressed the newly enforced curtailments.

I proper shat myself when the nodes finally made their way to the top of my arm. I remember how will power, perseverance and  determination had all become remote memories. Luxuries one can endure only when one has a modicum of certainty about the longevity of one's existence. 

I began stretching myself and massaging my chest like a mad man in vain. No one was in the house at the time. Mum and Kim had gone out to Wales for the day. I kept stretching all different ways to relieve the internal discomfort and continued massaging my chest hoping to improve my circulation. At some point I felt like I knew the chest and bodily pains had peaked and would not become any more intense, so like a true addict I went back outside for 3 more ciggies!! It was a very sad to witness myself incapable of exercising the necessary rationality to do the right thing despite being in a life or death scenario. 

Mum and Kim came back from Wales and I was conspicuously muted for the rest of the night. I went to bed and struggled finding a comfy position to sleep in. The next day mum enquired what was wrong with me. She had two wrong guesses before guessing correctly that I had chest pains. She gave me one of her unopened asthma inhalers and two dissolvable aspirin to thin my blood. It was my day off work, so I went back to bed and slept. 

I woke up mid-afternoon, a little less riddled with chest pains but lung capacity was still bare minimum. My body's maintenance dept needed more time to carry out essential repairs, so I went back to sleep.

I woke up late that evening, with slightly greater lung capacity now but the chest pains had returned as before. It was around 8pm and dark outside. I had an impulse to be proactive to help open my arteries I'd foolishly clogged up with tar and plaque, but walking any distance had become a exhausting chore requiring delicate navigation, especially if it was to at least look half natural. 

I told mum I was going to the local woods to breath some clean forest air. She questioned whether that was such a good idea given my restrictions but I said I was going anyway. 

The woods is only 5 minutes away. I got there and didn't go too far in, but far enough to know when to try and breath deeply. It felt good. Consecutive deep inhales and exhales of clean air really helped break up the heavy shit that had been sitting on my lungs for the past months.

The next morning I decided that visiting the woods each day to inhale its restorative air would be part of my new daily health regimen. So that's what led me to start taking pictures there and posting them every day on my facebook.