Health reality checks # 1 - my ticker

Since hitting my mid-50s, I've started to bio-degrade more rapidly than I did in my 40's. It catches you a little by surprise how quickly your body says 'oh ffs, will you stop?'. The Xmas period was essentially an all-out cough-a-thon for me, accompanied by acute arthritis and a dodgy ticker in atrial fibulation.

So first thing to address was the heart - and even though I'd had a heart operation to fix my arrhythmia before (it failed), we thought we'd give it another go. Here's how it went.

It was a roaring success this time round, and the doctor's assistant even hung this picture up in their office. Now onto the cough...