Yes, this is an interesting and amusing thread. My wife started gardening about 15 years ago. A small garden but it did look nice when it bloomed. I helped dig up a half circle 15' in the front yard and she bought perennials and such and tended it for about 3 yrs with our daughter. I had little or no interest and had better(?) things to do. Then she got into computer games and has been inside the computer and xbox for the last dozen or so years? The online stuff/ She did em all. About 5 yrs ago I started doing gardening and landscaping on a limited budget. I dumpster dove, thrift stored, found after season sales and discarded plants and received some 'half dead' plants that I resurrected. Each year I had a different theme for the yard since I took out all the grass, moved her original plants, brought in free dirt, built a strawberry hill, and planted trees (some dead- hey, the squirrels and birds I feed don't know they are dead---just gives them a place to perch and check out the scene before venturing in to eat.) I dug up the boulevard. Well, wife and her family joke about some things---up theirs. It is my refuge. As I told wife and son once, you want me in there bugging you about equal 'puter time or rearranging the office? If not, then bug off. So I dig, and play and move things about and watch the birds and sqirrels (hard to draw more than sparrows in the city but I get a few cardinals and the like occassionally.) If I decide to give up this hobby I will take up fishing again and hunting for a sweetie pie who is also lonely. Some spouses should be glad they can look out the window and see their SO doing what they enjoy rather than sitting around wondering what they are doing.

You're already received some very sound advice... While I can't suggest any cookbooks, I can offer some of the tips I've learned since hubby had his heart attack and strokes ( high blood pressure and high cholesterol )... First things first... If he's unable to go back to work you are going to be under a LOT of stress... Try to finds ways to cope... You won't be much help to him if you get sick too... (ask me how I know) What I found to be the most valuable was keeping track of every thing he ate for a week or two... Every slice of bread, every sip of pop, everything... I made up a chart and kept track of the sodium and fats... ( I used a booklet called Nutritive Value of Foods from the U.S. Publishing Office that I picked up years ago. ) It wasn't all that hard, since he's home all the time, and I found out that I was actually keeping him below his limits ( had him down to 500 mg of sodium and 15 to 20 g of fat a day, way too low for a man )... Check with your hubby's doctor or a good nutritionist to find out his limits... After you find out his limits and total up what he eats you'll be able to cook healthy for him... Try not to refer to it as a diet.... It's best if you think about it as healthy eating, cutting back on the bad stuff and increasing the good stuff... Cut back to 3 or 4 oz, total, of meat a day and double up on veggies & fruits... If he has favorite foods that he says he can't live without, that are bad for him, just limit the amounts or how often he has them... Totally eliminating something will only make him want it more and create more problems, mainly resentment and anger towards you. Keep plenty of fruits on hand for snacking, cut it up if you have to... Within a few weeks he'll head for the fruit instead of looking for the chips... Fruit juice, with all its calories, is better than pop or coffee ( a lot of caffeine is bad for heart patients ).... Only buy frozen or canned veggies without any added salt... My hubby will only eat canned and I was lucky enough to find a Save-A-Lot store that carries them, for a lot less than the regular chain stores and the quality is just as good or better... Hunt's sells a lot of tomato products without salt, including ketchup... Herb-Ox Low Sodium beef bullion is passable but the chicken is lacking... Read the labels of everything you buy, twice... Read it the first time to check the fat and sodium content then read it again for the serving size, low fat - low salt isn't necessarily so... Take the cooking sprays for example, a serving is a 3 SECOND blast, by the time you say it you're already over the 3 second limit... ( I dab a paper towel with canola oil and wipe the pans with that )... Healthy breads aren't all that healthy for heart patients, the mushy white stuff only has 135 mg of sodium per slice and I've seen 'healthy' bread with as much as 450 mg per slice... You have to really read the labels! You can 'fry' healthy with water... I buy pork loins and beef roasts, trim off the fat and grind it up for patties and 'fry' them with a bit of water... Cover the meat, let the steam do its thing and cook a bit more with the cover off to brown... For 'fried' potatoes I parboil them in the microwave then brown in a frying pan with 2 teaspoons of canola... You have to keep turning or flipping them so they brown evenly but most of the time they look like real fried potatoes... French fries don't work as well... I stay away from prepared foods, as much as possible, because of the fats and sodium... But making everything from scratch can truly be a huge pain, especially when things go wrong from lack of salt or are too dry because you've cut the fats too much... Look for recipes that don't call for much of either ( there's 2,132 mg of sodium in 1 teaspoon of salt, it doesn't matter which kind.. watch out for baking soda, baking powder, MSG, soy sauce, anything that has sodium in the word )... Some times you can substitute apple sauce for some of the fats but don't try removing all of it... MAKE SURE HE TAKES HIS ALL HIS MEDICATIONS! If all your efforts fail to get him on the right track ask him if he'd like to have another heart attack or perhaps a stroke and become totally depend on you for all his daily needs. Rita Above all cultivate your sense of humor, you'll need it to get you through the tough times.

I looked for a wrist watch around Christmas and everywhere I went the salespeople told me they were crap. I did order a very nice wrist blood pressure monitor from Costco that also measured pulse, but while it was a very nice unit, I took it back because it couldn't be worn during exercise and I already have a good one for when I am still. My exercise cycle gives me a reading on my pulse and so do several of the machines where I work out. I make sure that I am on one of those machines at least every 5 minutes while I am exercising. I have a lot of trouble with an overly rapid heartbeat, so it is very important to me. I try to keep myself under 85% of maximum heart rate, but it is hard. I would love to have something I could wear easily all the time. I wound up in the ER not long ago and it was very expensive. If I'd had a monitor I would have known to quit before the chest pains started.

Well, my story is sort of complicated. I had a horrible case of influenza and pneumonia back in l995. Then I was on antibiotics for 2 months. I don't know if the antibiotics did me in, or it was the flu/pneumonia, but shortly after that, I developed fibromyalgia and also started going through menopause. I also developed irritable bowel syndrome, GERD and sleep apnea. Its hard to sort it all out, but something seems to cause all of this stuff in me. Are you bowels acting the same? Do you suddenly feel extremely full after eating? Are you on any other meds? When my GI problems were their worst, I was put on a PPI (proton pump inhibitor). That helped the symptoms for awhile. Pepsid (an H2 blocker) does absolutely nothing for me, so you might ask your doc for a prescription for a PPI......oh wait....I think prilosec is otc now. You could buy that and try it. Don't lose hope yet. This might just be a temporary thing you're going through. There is a Ph.D. guy who was on the GERD forum for awhile who wrote a book on how carbohydrates cause alot of GI problems. He believes our systems aren't designed to eat all these carbs and they can't be digested quickly and they ferment, and that causes alot of gas/reflux, etc. So I think you'd do well to lower your carb consumption. The stress echo I had went like this: You go in, and they put you on a heart monitor, and then you get on a treadmill, and they slowly increase the speed and incline, until you reach your target heartrate. Then you immediately lay down and they do an echocardiogram on your heart. It doesn't hurt at all. If they want you to have a nuclear med stress echo, then you will have to have a contrast medium injected into your vein.......but most stress echoes are the first type I talked about. It shows if all your heart muscle and valves are working right. what kind of doctor are you seeing? Once they rule out a heart problem (which I'm sure they will), then I would suggest seeing a good gastroenterologist. I think for some of us, as we age, our parts just don't work as well, and we can't abuse them like we used to. I know that my GI tract does fine, until I start eating too much, and then it starts to fail. You might be able to take care of this problem, just by changing your eating habits. I know how hard that can be! I've struggled with it my whole life. Its much better for me than it used to be, but I think that's because my hormones finally settled down. Men have hormones too, and sometimes they get wacky. I actually think my strange chest sensations are a combination of my GERD and my IBS.