The distance is the first thing Declan Keane mentions, before the diagnosis and before the surgery. Two hours each way, and the cattle do not know you have had a heart attack.
Acute care was never the weak point. The ambulance was fast, the intervention was routine, and discharge came in five days. What almost failed was everything after.
The first fortnight home
Uploads were reviewed twice weekly. The calls that followed were rarely about anything dramatic — a heart rate recovery that had drifted the wrong way across four sessions, that sort of thing.
We lose more people to missed follow-up than to the event itself. Not dramatically. Slowly.
Dr. Yusuf Marchetti, cardiology
Twelve weeks, graded
Return to work was staged over eleven weeks rather than signed off in one appointment, with the occupational health assessment done before the first shift rather than after the first problem.
“Everyone tells you about the operation,” he says. “Nobody tells you the operation is the short part.”
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