Health Big Year

At the end of last month, I got in to see a cardiologist, I guess because my “calcium score” on a CT-CA scan (my GP wanted to persuade me to take statins) was 600, with 400+ being “extreme.” My brother had just had a quadruple bypass and our father had had angina for years before dying of a heart attack. The cardiologist told me to expect the worst and organised me for an angiogram a few days later.
Fronting up, nervous, I listened to his pre-procedure briefing. Again, he warned me. An angiogram is an amazing procedure, shimmying up through a tiny hole in an arm, giving the cardiologist intimate access to the arteries around the heart, all done with a general anaesthetic. I drifted off. When the cardio, sweaty with hard labour, briefed me a little time later, at first I could not comprehend. Apparently, only one artery is partly blocked but not consequentially, and no action need be taken. I have a clean bill of health, can jog to my heart’s content, can hike up steep mountains.
That was my “health scare” that ended up with “good news.”
But I’m not satisfied. Why the giddy calcium score? Am I low risk now for a heart attack? If so, why am I taking statins? Do statins work? What are my morbidity/mortality risks? Was my previous diet/exercise regime (fashioned with some thought) adequate or, better still, optimal? What about other “older person” risks such as cancer and Alzheimer’s? Should my “health scare” prompt relaxation or should I change up how I eat and how I exercise?
All these questions and many more not even formulated prompt me to start this Healthy Big Year, which I’ll actually run for sixteen months (since a Big Year best fits a calendar year but I want to start now). As with all Big Years, I commit to a daily task. In this case, each day I shall either do something positive for health and longevity or I’ll spend half an hour researching what I should be doing.
I sigh, aware that this Healthy Big Year may well prove to dull as dull can be. So be it. By putting focus where I should, surely at the end of 2023 I’ll have resolved all my many questions? Surely?