today's happenings

Yesterday was my appointment with the cardiologist. Apparently, the halter monitor showed my heartrate peaked up to 185 a couple of times throughout the day, and he was a little concerned. So he ordered a stress test, which was done today. I basically had to walk on a treadmill with sticky things attatched to my chest, which was in turn attatched to a machine that recorded my heartrate while I walked briskly on the treadmill. My heartrate was at 75 before I started. The treadmill started at a moderate pace, the technition was questioning my reason for being there. "Sounds like it's stress" she said confidently. My breathing was getting labored, and my heartrate was climbing, up to 114 now. (the treadmill speeds up every three minutes) "Yes, that seems to make it worse, for sure, but even on a good day, when I'm relaxing in the bathtub, my heart begins to palpitate. And sometimes when I'm laying in bed my heart pounds so hard, I can hear a slight rustle of the sheets. I know that sounds crazy. Sometimes I'll wake myself up trying to catch my breath because my heart feels like it skipped a beat." "Hmmm" she said, watching the screen. By this point I'm pretty much out of breath, and my heartrate is up to 165. "Okay, you can stop now if you'd like. Your heart rate climbed up pretty quickly". I walk over to the chair and have a seat while she records my resting period. I can see on the monitor my heartrate slow down quite quickly, 95..86...73. "Wow, I've recovered pretty quickly" I said. And then, it happens. "Oh, we got something, right here. You paused between beats for let's see..... a second. That's significant. I'll monitor you a little longer." So there I sat, topless, boobs hangin out and all. I started to feel a palpitation again, and a little short of breath. I look up, and see my heart rate is up at 118. "that's bizarre" I said. "You'd think it would stay steady at a cool down". "There've been more pauses" she said, "and all of them are about a second long. A two second pause means you'd need a pacemaker." Once again, my heart rate dipped down to 80 something, and then climbed all the way back up to 135 this time. She recorded all of this, and it went on for about 10 minutes.

"Have you had the halter monitor yet?" "Yes about a month ago" "Follow me into my office and we'll take a look at the results then. Let's see if we can find anything funny". I sat there as she searched for my file, which was under a misspelled name. After looking at the results for a while, she said "ah-ha! Here we are. Your heartrate is at 90 here, and then suddenly jumps to 185. More pauses, intermittently, all over the place. I'm not sure if he (my doc) saw ALL of this. I'm going to highlight and print all of the significant stuff out, along with the results of the stress test, and give it to him right now. He may want you to come back today, or Monday."

So here I sit at home, and the day is almost over, with no call from the office. Just as well, because it's hotter then hell outside. Which brings me to the next subject. Our air condition broke. It's 100 and something degrees outside, and our damn air condition broke last night. I'm thanking my lucky stars the air people came out right away this morning and fixed it. So, anyway, back to the heart thing. I have an appointment already scheduled for Friday, at 10:40, and we will see if he needs to see me sooner then that. I doubt it. I've lived with this palputating, eurythmia crap for years now. One more week isn't going to make a huge difference.