NEW YORK (AP) – Former President Clinton dismissed concerns that his decision to campaign for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry seven weeks after undergoing heart surgery is risky, saying, “I want to do this.”

In an interview Sunday with ABC News, Clinton said he talked to his doctors about it and “they made some very helpful suggestions.”

“They said, you know, I should get wherever I’m going early in case I’m tired, so I can kind of regenerate,” he said.

The former president planned to attend a rally with Kerry, a Massachusetts senator, in Philadelphia on Monday morning and then travel to Florida for a rally that evening.

He said his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., was not worried that it was too soon for him to campaign but “didn’t want me to do too much, and I don’t either,” he said in the interview scheduled to air Monday on “Good Morning America.”

“I think you know there’s only so much anyone else can do in a campaign that he or she is not the candidate in,” Clinton said.

“But I want to do this. Sen. Kerry asked me to do it. And I want to do it.”

Clinton, 58, has been recovering at his home in Chappaqua after undergoing quadruple bypass surgery in New York City on Sept. 6.