The impact of fitness on healing.

I did a lot of, I was a bit overweight and had a very stressful job, but I really worked hard on my personal fitness. I've always been pretty fit and only 3 years ago, I'm 64 now, but only 3 years ago I did a half marathon in the mountains in Kenya. So I've always been quite a reasonable runner varying degrees of weight but I did a lot of running in the run up to my surgery and I also did a lot of abdominal exercises and to improve my strength in my tummy muscles and so on and I found that that and you know the whole fitness thing that I did did was incredibly helpful because when you're lying on a hospital bed and if you're trying to favor and protect the wound from the surgery, it's really good to have upper body strength so you can use the rails on the bed to not give you pain from the wound itself. I think it held me in really good stead because I was in hospital for a week, probably could have come out sooner if I'm honest, but I was in hospital for a week and very quickly, the recovery was really quick, but I do put that down, apart from the great surgery that I had, I do put that down partly to my personal fitness before I went into hospital. And another takeaway that I would say from the counselling I received before surgery was to try and get as lean as possible. I was nowhere near as lean as I would have liked to have been because I was a bit overweight before. But now I'm just determined to get down to a really lean weight. And I think that's really important for anything in life.