What your feeling is normal. Before I had my mitraclip fitted last year I went through three years of not being able to do anything, not being able to walk from my lounge to the kitchen without getting breathless, not being able to bend down to open the oven door without having to sit down afterwards, not being able to walk more than about 50 yards. And it was hard for my DP and my parents, none of who live locally so only had me talking on the phone to go on to see if I was still alive...
Then last year I had my surgery after six weeks in hospital, two admissions to ICU, a cardiac arrest and a serious crash needing defibrillation. Twice during that time they were taking things hour by hour so to speak, and when I was admitted on the first night I asked the ICU nurse with me if I was going to die, and he said “well, obviously we always want to make people better here.” I think it’s pretty obvious that was code for “quite possibly, but obviously I’m not going to say that to you directly.” 
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After I came home my life turned around and I was suddenly able to do things I hadn’t been able to in years. And my family found it hard. If my DP woke up in the night he would listen to make sure I was breathing. Initially my parents didn’t want to go back home and leave me on my own with just ds. My mum would ring me and if I didn’t answer my phone after she’d rang me twice she would ring my DS if my DP wasn’t here or my DP if he was. This anxiety wasn’t aided by the fact that on one such occasion she rang only for my DP to tell her we were in an ambulance on the way to hospital because my ICD had been pacing significantly (I think I wrote about that in my last post.)
But the longer I have been out and symptomless, the more relaxed they have become. And I think that lockdown has actually helped immensely with that, because I’ve had to be on my own. Well I have DS but he’s almost eighteen and I don’t rely on him. And I’ve done everything. Been batch cooking/cutting the grass/I even bought a hedge trimmer much to the horror of my mum and DP (I am blind into this bargain.) .
And we don’t even really talk about it now, other than to acknowledge that one day I will need a transplant, but I have been living so normally that even that seems like a hypothetical, even though I know that it isn’t and will really happen one day.
I know I will regress at some point, and so do my family. I know my family would like me to move closer to home, but from my perspective I’m here and I’m living normally, looking for work and hoping to get a new guide dog and nothing has changed from before I got sick. Because we no-one knows when our time is up. I take the view that I could go out tomorrow and be hit by a bus. Or I could die of heart failure, or I could have a transplant and live into my 80s, or maybe none of that and not die until I was 90 with this just being a blip in my history.
And I think that attitude has helped those who have struggled with this more than me.
Only time is going to tell how your dh will be affected by this. If he has symptoms after this then you work with it and it becomes a part of your normal but with the added backup of knowledge and also the fact you are already under a cardiologist.
And if he doesn’t have symptoms then in time it will just be something in the past.
Even the medication is something you get used to. Before I got sick I never even used to take paracetamol. Now I take a cocktail of drugs powerful enough to kill me over time with my morning glass of orange juice and I don’t even give it a second thought. There are some things I have to be aware of e.g. I take warferin and there are some foods which affect the INR. Also if I cut myself I have to deal with it quickly because it bleeds more. I cut myself on the blade of the food processor about a year ago, a tiny tiny cut and the kitchen looked like a murder scene. I had to clean the worktop, the table, wash the kitchen floor and we had to order a takeaway.
I’ve had a couple of blips because we’re human beings and nobody is infallible. Last October I was told my results were bad and I had maybe a year before I regressed to the point of needing to go on the transplant list. I made all the changes they told me to, including having to stick to a 1500ml fluid restriction, and my results came back down and almost a year on I’m still a-symptomatic.
A few weeks ago I had a call from the GP re blood results and they told me my kidneys could be failing and my thyroid is overactive which caused me another spell of over thinking. Then talked to cardiology and they said those results are within the normal realms given the drugs I have to take.
I have written an essay here, apologies. What i would say though is take things one day at a time. And before you realise it one day will become two, then a week, then hopefully months then years. Just see how things go.
:-)