I get heart palpitations. They're not serious, but my doctor wants to clear me for running races. So I had a cardiac consult a couple weeks ago -- EKG, treadmill stress test, multiple BP readings, ultrasound... the works.
"Everything looks good," Heart Doc said. "Come back in two weeks to get fitted for a 24-hour heart rate monitor."
Cool, I thought. No problem. I pictured this:
...the neat kind you wear during workouts -- the ones that strap around your rib cage and fade into the background.
HA-HA. No. What I got was this:
...only that picture doesn't show the full length of the cables, which hang almost to my knees. I have 5 of those adhesive electrode pads on my chest, secured with layers of medical tape for our planned hill-repeat workout tomorrow morning. Plus the many dangling
I get to go to a Chamber of Commerce meeting today with my squidly get-up. Yay, science! I almost feel like Steve Austin, in the secret government bionics lab. Except I don't go BOI-OI-OI-OING when I run.
Only 23 hours, 23 minutes, and 48 seconds to go.
8 ate pie:
Good for you for getting checked out.
I wore one of those for a month back in 2006. After a while, it's not so bad. If I felt an "event", I was supposed to push a button, then call a phone number so I could put the phone speaker-to-speaker with the device and record "the events" at some lab where an unfortunate medical student was required to listen to my phoned-in paranoia.
Good news was that it was pretty much paranoia.
Entertainment value: I was nearly in a wreck while I was wearing it and I recorded the "event". Your heart does, indeed, stop when you're scared.
So it's not just an expression! Yike. Good thing your brain can get it going again. Did they show you the graph?
A month? I'm still trying to figure out where to put it when I sleep tonight. Bummed I can't shower immediately after the run tomorrow (gotta wait the full 24 hours), but at least Doc will be able to see any workout-related weirdness.
Did they do labs? I was having problems with PVC's and runs of tachycardia for a while and it turned out I was really very anemic.
Yup, I get labs every quarter. It's a thyroid-related thing.
Fortunately, I didn't have to wear the thing while I slept and they gave me a bunch of stickies for the connections. I actually didn't send in the heart-stopping moment. I figured that the data would throw something off.
The eventual verdict was PVCs and PACs and I should chill the f*** out, everyone gets them.
I set a chair by the bed, put the monitor on it, and slept on my back (normal for me, luckily). Felt so good to take off all that tape this morning.
I think everyone would benefit from chilling out. It's not the end of the world. Or if it is, it's only going to happen once.
I vote you trick the squid out and tell people you're an Iron Man prototype :)
Here's hoping for a clean bill of health!
Ha! Thanks, Beth!
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