I realize I haven’t been blogging very much in the past month. I’ve had lots of medical issues that have been distracting me. Let me explain.
If you’re paying attention, you read in my April 23, 2004 blog entry that I started a low sodium diet and a daily diuretic, for my ears. That following weekend, as I’ve been doing, I rode my bike to my team’s Ultimate Frisbee game and warmed up with them. At the time, I didn’t feel like I was quite ready to play a real game yet, though I have since. Anyhow, after the bike ride home, my heart was having skipped beats and palpitations all afternoon. Now, it’s done this regularly for about the past 20 years, and I’ve learned it happens more when I’m fatigued. But usually I only notice it four or five times a day, but that day it was happening lots. So clearly my body was telling me something.
The next day, I called my ear doctor and my regular doctor, and I stopped taking the diuretic pills and my allergy medicine, thinking they may be having some combined effect. Later that week, I went to see my regular doctor and my blood pressure was elevated above where it normally is (144 and normally it’s around 132). He looked at all these symptoms – high blood pressure, overweight (which I’ll definitely admit and am working on), high cholesterol (which I knew should be coming down due to a new cholesterol medicine I started), and now heart palpitations – and decided I probably have “metabolic syndrome”. He wanted me to come in for a treadmill test and a blood test ASAP. So I went in for one later that week, got my chest hair shaved and electrodes attached to me, and got up on the treadmill. But it was broken. So they sent me home and said they’d call me when it was fixed.
Well, the following week I went in to try the treadmill test again. They like to do this thing where they ramp up your heart rate using increasing speed and angle until you read your max heart rate. For a 35 year old male, the “max heart rate” is 185. I went up to 190, and although my knee hurt and I was definitely at the limit of my physical ability, my heart didn’t burst. So the treadmill EKG game out normal. Once they got the blood test back, they found that my cholesterol was way down, too, thanks to the new medicine.
But I still wanted to know why I’ve always had these skipped heart beats, since that was why I went in in the first place. So a few days later I got fitted for a Holter monitor. That’s like a portable EKG that you wear for 24 hours. You can’t shower with it on, obviously. I wore it all day and night and then got it off the following morning. They sent in the data for analysis, and that came back as normal, too. So, in the course of a month, I went from my doctor saying, “Mr. Bradley, you’re falling apart and have a high risk of heart problems” to “Well, every test we’ve run on you looks normal.” So it’s been a stressful month from a health perspective, but has gotten better as I’ve learned that everything’s looking good.
Since then, I went back on the diuretic, though not the allergy medicine. So what happened that day? My best guess is that the decongestant in the allergy medicine I was taking, combined with being a bit dehydrated from riding in the sun without drinking enough, caused my body to get more fatigued than I realized. And that caused the skipping heartbeats.
Anyhow, meanwhile, I’ve lost a few more pounds, played my first league Ultimate Frisbee games in a year, and have been getting in better shape. Today I went for a 20 mile bike ride in the wind.
Also in the last month, I bought an iPod, organized all my MP3s in iTunes, bought some songs, and watched a few movies.