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My name is David Jackson. I'm a cardiologist here in Columbia.
I'm the director of the Cardiac Rehab program here at Howard County General
Hospital.
I'm Preeti Benjamin. I'm the manager of Howard County General's
Cardiac and Pulmonary services.
I'm Suzie Jeffreys. I'm an exercise physiologist
here at Howard County General Hospital.
My name is Jim Greco and I'm a heart transplant patient.
When you're disabled through a heart condition, there's a lot of factors going on that you have to deal with.
One, you need to change your lifestyle. You need to learn how
to eat properly. You need to learn how to read labels and to
understand what they say on the foods that you buy and prepare.
You need to know how to exercise and frankly once you've had
a bad heart attack, you're afraid to exercise. A lot of people
say, "well, you know exercise is what caused it," or
"exercise with the bad heart is what caused it,"
and what you're gonna learn is that your lifestyle is what caused it or your
genetic predispositions have caused it
and what you need to do is now learn how to live and work and enjoy life
within the parameters that you've now got to work with, and that's what cardiac
rehab does.
Cardiac rehab is two-fold. First, it's an exercise program. What we found is that
many of our patients are middle-aged or older
and they've gone throughout their life really not being involved in any
exercise program
uh....they've had a cardiac event and at that point
they are somewhat hesitant to do anything physical because they feel that
they may have another event or they may be hurting themselves.
Well, it's far from it and so the program is designed to encourage
patients to exercise
in a way that's more supervised, is monitored
and we want the patients to be sure that it's safe.
They do a variety of exercises...
bikes, treadmills, upper body, arm machines, weights.
So we get a broad spectrum of people. We get people who
are endurance athletes and people who have not exercised for 30 years
or maybe never exercised formally before,
so, getting them into the program three days a week...
starting to exercise if they're that de-conditioned
person who have never done anything is really a new journey for them.
We see a variety of patients
with zero or little fitness to patients that have multiple diseases
in addition to their cardiac history. We have patients that have
diabetes, arthritis,
pulmonary issues and we try to manage all of that here.
Even though I changed all those things I had
four more heart attacks and each time after the coronary event
my doctors put me back through cardiac rehab because I had to relearn what my
new limitations were
and I had to relearn
where my safe limits were. So, I think for the last twenty years
I've done as well as I could it's all because of
the group over there at Howard County General and the good doctors, nurses that
work with them.
The other part of the program is educational. People who have had an event....
there are reasons why they've had an event...they're overweight,
they have diabetes, they have high cholesterol, their blood pressure is not
well controlled,
they smoke, and so on. And so our goal is to
encourage them to treat those risk factors,
to understand the relationship between those risk factors
and heart disease and to encourage them to be more
astute in following their disease state to make sure that they treat
themselves well
after they've had their event so they don't have another event.
Most of our patients are anxious or depressed,
not sure what they can do, so one of the things that we help do
is we help build their confidence and we also
show them in a
non-threatening way some of the lifestyle changes that they can make.
We really focus on giving them the tools that they need, so teaching them how to
read food labels is
probably one of the most important things we give them
As you know, the front of the package
is always the enticer and so we encourage them to turn the package over
and read actually what they're getting
One of the unique things I think about our program
is the fact that we have patients coming into the program at all different times
which allows some of the newbies to get
support and encouragement from some of the patients that have been here for a
little while longer.
Cardiac rehab shows you how to exercise, it shows you how to exercise safely.
It teaches you how to recognize your limits
and how to work within those parameters so that you work safely
and they do that by monitoring you for 12 weeks
and showing you literally
what's too much and what's not enough and by doing that they instill a great
amount of confidence in you
and it lets you get back to living a normal life.