The Recipe for Life: Healthy eating for real people. Sally Bee

Introduction

      In my first book, The Secret Ingredient, apart from all the lovely, healthy recipes, I wrote about my experiences when I suffered three heart attacks in the space of one week at the tender age of 36. I spoke about the moment my husband was told to come and say his goodbyes, and about the immediate effects the experience had on both my family and myself. The trauma I suffered was huge, both physically and emotionally, and it took such a long time to recover to the level of fitness that I have now, happily, achieved.

      So, moving on, I’d now like to share with you the next stage of my recovery, which will lead on nicely to the delicious recipes included in this book. It may seem like a strange partnership: survival, recovery and food. But if you read on, I think you’ll start to understand what good healthy food has meant to me, and maybe it will help you understand your relationship with food a little better. I hope so…

      MY FRAGILE HEART

      To briefly recap on my story so far, I suffered from three very serious heart attacks when I was aged just 36. At the time I was mum to a five-year-old, a two-year-old and my baby was just nine months old. So life was pretty busy, as you can imagine. My heart attacks hit me completely out of the blue. I was, or thought I was, fit and strong and healthy. As a mum of three young children, there was never time to sit back and be poorly, but I was happy. My heart attacks weren’t caused by the usual heart disease, rather, a rare and usually fatal condition called Spontaneous Coronary Artery Dissection (SCAD). In essence, what happened was that the main artery inside my heart that was responsible for feeding the large bulk of the heart muscle with blood and oxygen fell apart, or ‘dissected’. If my artery had just dissected in a small area, the doctors could have performed a bypass operation to save me, but because the dissection went from the top of the artery to the very bottom, the doctors knew there was nothing they could do to save me, so they simply left me alone and told my husband to come in and say goodbye.

      Just as my husband Dogan came into the operating room, and I realised that I was still alive, my battle began. The next few minutes were dramatic. My body was giving up but my mind had taken control. I had allowed myself to think about the children…and my life…and I wasn’t ready to give it all up yet. It was a struggle because by this stage my failing heart and other organs had other ideas–good job I’m a strong-minded chick!

      The following days passed in a bit of a blur. I couldn’t move, talk, cough or cry without my heart going into melt down. The nursing staff where struggling to understand what was happening to me. The monitor that I was constantly hooked up to couldn’t recognise the rhythms that my heart was getting into, yet it kept coming out of all the little episodes, still ticking! After a few days, I demanded that they wash my hair. I was told in no uncertain terms that I had no chance. I couldn’t even get up to go to the bathroom at this stage, so a hair wash was completely out of the question. Let’s just say I have great powers of persuasion, and with a team of doctors and nurses on stand-by ‘just in case’, I was shuffled on my back to the end of my bed, with my head just tipping off the end and my hair was washed. It felt amazing. When my mum arrived bearing my lipstick the following day, I knew I had to continue with this approach to have any chance of a normal life again.

      But it wasn’t so easy. Between writing my previous book and this one, my lovely mum was diagnosed with cancer and, just a short nine months later, she died. The grief and sadness we all suffered when we learned about her diagnosis was at times unbearable and overwhelming, but at least we knew what to expect, so could begin to prepare ourselves. We knew that mum’s journey from this point had a beginning, a middle and an end. I remember very vividly the day she was told it was terminal. We all had a big cry and a little quiet time, then arranged a big, happy party for all our family and friends the following weekend. Looking back now, how crazy that seems. Mum spent the final two weeks of her life in a wonderful hospice near my home and my dad and I spent every possible moment with her. Those two weeks were the most precious weeks of my life. Although unbearably painful, we all knew and understood what was going to happen and my mum accepted it fully, I think. This didn’t make it any less upsetting or painful, but it did mean that we knew what we had to do. My mum even managed to make her own funeral arrangements, being bossy about what we were allowed to sing, wear and eat!

      In contrast, after my heart attacks, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I hadn’t been told I would definitely die but I also wasn’t told that I would definitely live. Because my heart condition is so very rare, my cardiologists couldn’t find any other survivors that I could talk to. So I was sent home without any positive prognosis, just a continuing feeling of impending doom and uncertainty. I was scared of everything in the beginning. Absolutely everything. I was afraid to laugh, afraid to cry, to get angry or upset, afraid to shout and love. I was so scared to move too quickly, I couldn’t drive, I couldn’t play with my children or go out with my friends. I was afraid to go out of my front door and, at the same time, afraid to stay at home. I couldn’t seem to find a way out of the prison that was now my life.

      Although my family and friends were happy and pleased to see me back home, they didn’t really understand what I was going through. I don’t think I helped the situation, as I was a great pretender! When I got a little stronger, but was still struggling to cope with day-to-day things, I would go through a great long process to appear normal to those around me. My eldest son was five years old at this time and he was desperate for me to pick him up from school, just like the other mums, but I couldn’t manage the walk around the block to walk him home as he wanted. So instead, I would spend the entire day getting ready. Washing and drying my hair was a three-hour process, including all the rests I needed in between. Then I would get my mum or husband to drive me round the corner to school, long before any of the other parents arrived. I could sit quietly on the bench in the playground to get my breath back. When the other parents arrived I would smile happily and give everyone a big wave. I could see them wondering what all the fuss was about. They had heard that I was gravely ill, yet here I was looking fine! If only they knew. So my super little chap would run out of school and I would be able to stand up and throw my arms around him and hear all his excitable babble from his day that just had to come out the moment he saw me. Mission accomplished. I was a normal mum for my five-year-old precious boy. I would then sit down while a friend walked Tarik home, and when everyone else left the playground I would be quietly helped back to the car and be