Love in the Time of Cholesterol: A Memoir with Recipes

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

You gotta feel sorry for Basil. First, his doctor cuts up his chest to
perform open-heart surgery. Then his wife cuts up his personality to
ponder how it affected his heart problems and post-op recovery.

Basil, a 44-year-old media specialist, experienced stress in the form
of a new job, daily commuting in the most frenzied highway traffic in
Canada, and purchasing a second home. The result was a heart attack,
followed by an angiogram, quadruple bypass surgery, and a lengthy
recovery.

The author looks at her husband, Basil, much as one would look at a rat
in a research lab. She describes his strengths and weaknesses
(weaknesses first), his reactions, moods, fears, anxieties, coping
style, and achievements. To this documentation she brings a strong hint
of love and respect, a gentle humour, and a sense of wonder at the size
of the challenge and the extent of the progress toward recovery. It’s
a personal, and personalized, story of heart disease and recovery from
the caregiver’s point of view, including an attempt to convey the
degree of devastation open-heart surgery has on the body. Some readers
may find the descriptions of the disease, diagnostic details, and
corrective procedures to be overly graphic. Fortunately these passages
are brief, and the overall focus is on the mind–body link and the
importance of staying healthy and engaged with life as recovery
progresses.

The prescription for recovery includes stress management, exercise, and
a low-cholesterol diet. Basil’s version of all these are integral to
the text, with diet receiving extra reinforcement in the form of 42
recipes wedged in, two at a time, at the end of chapters. Organic,
free-range, omega–3, and fresh herbs are key terms, setting the tone
for the recipe selection.

The book is a very engaging, readable memoir of an empathetic woman
struggling to be a supportive caregiver as her husband confronts his own
mortality.