Noel’s heart attack
Noel was 41 years old when he came to me a few months after he had suffered a heart attack. He was on medication and had been given the ‘all clear’, but he knew ‘in his heart’ that things weren’t quite right. His blood picture and all the tests showed that the medication was doing its job. The scans and other tests showed all was well, yet he still felt awful.
Because he came to me for naturopathic advice, we initially talked a little about his diet and lifestyle. Under the doctor’s advice he had promptly given up smoking a pack of cigarettes a day and drinking bourbon each night.
Yet Noel was still literally killing himself. He was drinking 2 litres of coke a day. He was also consuming about 20 (yes 20!) cups of coffee with 2 sugars in each every day. He ate take-away food – ‘healthy take-away’ he told me (said he never learned how to cook.) No wonder he had a heart attack. But that was in the past and he was ready to make a change for the better…so I thought.
I gave him a healthy living plan which he gratefully accepted and was on his way. The next month he came back and said he just couldn’t stick to the regime. When I asked him why, he said he didn’t know why, the plan was easy to follow but he just kept sabotaging it.
He then told me he felt awful - in fact he felt heart broken. He said that he hadn’t been in a relationship for some time, but felt OK about this. He just couldn’t put his finger on why he felt so heart broken.
Then came the story of how no one else ever wanted to look after him, so why should he? Surely he didn’t deserve to live. I asked him to explain and he told me how his mother put him up for adoption. Then, when he was 12 his adopting parents died in a car crash and he was brought up by his grandparents who resented him. His first marriage broke-up after he had an affair. His second marriage had recently broken-up because she had an affair. This guy really was heart broken. This was going to take some serious emotional healing.
I felt that he wouldn’t have felt inspired to keep coming to me if he didn’t feel I could help, so we set a program for healing his past. We worked on his feelings of abandonment, resentment, anger, grief, denial, forgiveness, self-love, self-esteem and self-acceptance with techniques I use both in clinic and on my one-week retreats. It took a few months of weekly visits but finally he had a breakthrough.
He is now so good with his diet and lifestyle that he shares his latest cooking secrets with me. He has also found the love of his life in a new inspiring relationship. It’s funny because I met her when she came to the clinic for a massage and she said it’s nice to have finally met a man without ‘baggage’. I felt like laughing but just smiled and said yes, you are very lucky to have found such a wonderful man.