It's awful to live in fear like this. I see a Cardiologist tomorrow (Monday) at 1:00pm and I'm terrified of having another episode before I get there. Not that a consultation is going to make things better, but it'll be a start.

The last time I went through this whole heart rhythm thing I was a teenager and I don't recall the process very well. I was also more ignorant of heart issues back then.

Now I just wish that I could go in and they could run tests before sending me home. Waiting sucks. Maybe they'll at least be able to get me on a decent monitor before I leave so that if someone happens, they can catch it.

In the meanwhile, I'm alone today and pretty much winding myself up into a tizzy waiting for my fiance to get home or my dad to get here in the next hour or so. I used to love alone time. Now I dread it like nothing else.

Ugh. Days off used to be the highlight of my week, now I would rather be at work all day every day because at least I'm only 2 minutes from a hospital there.

What has two thumbs and just ran 8.1 miles?

This guy.

:thumbup:

This PVC/PAC stuff can be, if not conquered, at least mastered.

Six years ago I was having 5-10,000 PVCs, every single day for a year.

I'm about 10 minutes post-run, I lost about 5 pounds of water weight in the run, just scarfed down two large pears and a dozen strawberries and a quart or so of water, heart rate at about 78 bpm, a few PACs on inhale here and there, but that's about it. All good.

Pretty soon I'm gonna look like those shirtless guys on muscle beach. :flex:

Can I say that each time I visit the site's home page and scroll down and see the half-naked picture of me in the left sidebar, I freak a little? Aaaah! What's that!

Oh. Just me.:bag:

Wearing this event monitor is seriously getting OLD! If I wasn't paranoid before I am now...Strange how the paranoia over every little skip or twinge can sneak up on you...I am at war with myself over that!
I have every confidence that there is probably NOTHING wrong with my heart...and that this all has to do with my uncontrolled high blood pressure...
However.... I will be much more confident if they give me a stress test in the end to know for sure. I want this to be so DONE!
Meanwhile I will try not to pitch this King of Hearts monitor out the window! :devil:

Well I have been flagged by the cardiac monitoring center :thumbup:...I am doing a happy dance..not that I want anything wrong with me... but relieved that they might have found something. Knowledge is Power and a great cure for the anxiety that all these skipped beats our tickers do to us! They have faxed the latest series of events over to my cardiologist's office. The cardiac tech at the cardiac monitoring center did mention that I have PVC's and runs of PAC's as well.
So we will wait and see...She suggested I call the cardiologist and give them a nudge...
It is certainly not an emergency because I had maintained a sinus rhythm..But my pulse rate was too high when I was walking the dog or climbing stairs...and it took a couple of hours after walking the dog to slow it up. I am already on Verapamil 240mg which is an anti-arrhythmic drug and my Hypertension is not well controlled...so I am positive that some new meds will have me up and ready to go again soon! :boxing:
So here I sit....waiting....To be continued I guess....

Boy these King of Hearts Monitor goes off easily at the slightest touch...I set mine off three times in a row by accident...grrrrr Hopefully my ticker will do something...anything today....:whistler:

My ticker has been amazingly well behaved...isn't that the way of things. My Grandma used to say watch pot never boil...So I am just going on with my day and what will be ....will be period...:whistler:

Yes I have resorted to naming my event monitor :P His name is Marvin..according to my Daughter who gave him his namesake...I figured humor is better than paranoia... LOL
So it is Day 10 sent in more information this morning...just some more skippy type heartbeats to send over the telephone wires...and a cardiac tech who said it came through fine...grrrr The waiting is the worst...not that I think anything is horribly wrong mind you, nor do I feel like I am going to drop dead....(although I must admit I have felt that way when my heart is thumping and doing gymnastics in there!)
It is more a feeling of I just want to get this over with and know what the heck is going on...but I am not impatient or anything ??? :squinch:
Meanwhile, my good friend Marvin sits, attached to my jean pocket just blinking the day away....

Traveling. And barfing. Got a stomach virus. Probably good for weight loss, but not much else.

I haven't forgotten about anybody. Just working back to full strength, that's all.

Is there really an up side?

Anyway - I've been working out like a man possessed lately - lots of cardio work at least 5 days a week, and just started mixing in weights.

And then my right knee came a-calling. In my right knee I have a medial meniscus that looks like a pumpkin about two weeks after Halloween: misshapen and ugly. It's been in various stages of decay since I was about 18, but it hadn't been bothering me for at least two years. Until yesterday.

I have a very fancy custom knee brace that helps, taking the pressure off that side of my knee, reducing bone-on-bone contact and giving what's left of that part of the meniscus room to breathe and maybe even heal. But I hate wearing it. Reminds me that I'm getting old.

The knee doesn't take anywhere near the pounding on my recumbent stationary bike as it does running, but I hate riding that thing, too.

The sacrifices we make for health and beauty. :laugh: Looks like the recumbent bike and I are going to become good friends. :squinch:

Call it a mid-life crisis. Call it a grand cardiovascular experiment. Call it a middle-age guy growing tired of waiting until next year before he finally gets off his ass and starts making himself trim and healthy.

You can even call it a benefit of popping antidepressants like Tic-Tacs (ok, I don't really do that, but you get the idea).

Whatever you call it, I'm getting myself into shape, and for those of you who've seen the Rocky movies, I feel like Rocky in Rock IV. The one where he trains in Russia with the simplest of methods and, quite literally, farm equipment.

Last year at this time, please pardon my french (not this French) I was scared shitless. I was having these brief bursts of something. I didn't know what. Felt like my heart was racing then stopping, twisting itself into a pretzel, and then just when I though I was going to keel over, it'd pop itself back into a normal rhythm.

I was scared to do anything. I'd still get on the treadmill, but I'd warm up so slowly that you'd think I was 90 years old and exercising at a rehab clinic. And I'd never get my heart rate up over about 135.

Fast forward to February of this year, and I'd had another battery of tests, blood work and en event monitor, and I got a diagnosis. PAT, aka PSVT. I also had a few couplets and triplets thrown in there for good measure. But none of it was life threatening. My cardio assured me that the scariest of my symptoms were simply not able to kill me. Couldn't do it. I could have that rhythm for days and not affect my life expectancy.

I was hesitant at first, but I believed her.

In Spring I got back into my work routine and would have days of virtually non-stop PVCs, bigeminy, trigeminy, you name it. But I knew from my decade worth of experience that I was still feeling the effects of truckloads of stress on my mind and body. The antidepressants I took were slowly changing my outlook and approach to much of my daily life. The pharmacists told me I'd have to wait for at least two weeks to feel the full effect.

I think that the changes they can create can actually take months.

Because here I am, one year removed from being pretty sure I was going to need an ICD or an ablation or some kind of heart procedure, and I'm exercising. Hard. And the beauty of it is, I don't even know how hard. In the last two months I've run either on a treadmill or on the roads in my neighborhood an average of 3 miles a day. Every day. Most days it's 5 miles.

...more in a bit....

These are just some of the thoughts running through my head.

1. It is amazing how quickly you get used to this thing.

2. It is somehow reassuring to put this on every day.

3. How many feelings I thought were my heart before, but now I won't press the button because I don't really think it is my heart.

4. What if I am not near a landline when I have an episode to report.

5. Somewhere in my head I don't think anything is seriously wrong, but what if it is? Should I have kept my head in the sand.

6. Waiting the minute to transmit and hear from the person on the other end is agony.

7. What would I do if the person on the other end of the phone tells me I need to call my doctor or worse, get to the hospital.

8. Why haven't I had any of the bad pvc's I was getting previous to wearing the monitor.

9. What am I going to do when the bad pvc's come back?

10. What if the 30 days go by and on day 31 I start getting my strong runs of skips? Then I think I will just have a nervous breakdown.

11. How many different ways can I try to hide this under my clothes?

12. What if I have to press the button at work and/or in front of other people?

Some days I wish I'd been a bit more disciplined like Jodie, and become a cardiologist (Jodie's not a cardiologist, but she IS more disciplined than I am). Over the last few months I have found myself completely intrigued by ECG tracings and the vast amount of information they can provide. Every single millimeter of that squiggly line can provide valuable information about the health status of your heart.

But sometimes I'm not sure if I go too far. I'm corresponding with a single mom from Romania right now (not sure if she lives in Romania or was born there) who's son has been having a multitude of cardiological tests to determine a diagnosis and decide on a course of treatment. One doctor says he needs ablation. Another says he's fine and doesn't need anything. In the meantime, she's watching her son slowly deteriorate, getting pale, tired all the time.

Enter me, with possibly more guts than brains, but learning to read ECGs and wanting to help. How can you not want to help a single mom with a son with medical issues? So I'm doing the very best that I can, researching what I can through my reference materials and scouring the web, providing her completely amateur medical opinions, but hoping it will help her to at least ask appropriate questions, and from those questions she can decide on the best course of treatment for her son.

I'm nervous to be doing this. But I'm also excited at the prospect of helping.

Well, the time has come and I will be getting my pfo closure done this Friday. I'm a little more positive now that I will be alright, however my negative thoughts still taunt me.My little girl and husband mean the world to me and I don't want to leave them!!!:( Please keep me in your prayers! -Amanda

Last week I stopped into my cardiologist's office to pick up the EKGs from my event monitor back in February. I picked them up because Jsuter69 was stressing about some increases in her heart rate that I thought were due to vagus nerve activity, and I knew I had captured some of that during my monitoring. I wanted to show her to confirm for her that it was normal, and that it was OK.

Ambivalent is a good word to explain how I felt about picking up those records. I was happy to be able to help Julie, and I thought that being able to scan in and post some of the other arrhythmia I had on my EKGs would be great teaching tools on the site. That was all good. But kind of like how you don't want to know how they prepare the chicken at your local restaurant, I was pretty sure I didn't want to know how my cardiologist came to the conclusion that all was OK and my arrhtyhmias were benign.

Because I know me, and I know I would not be able to keep myself from looking over every tracing, going over every detail, and I knew I was going to find things I didn't want to find.

And I did. To this point I knew I'd had several million PVCs in my life, but never thought I'd experienced any PVC couplets or triplets. But apparently I have, as I found both in the 50 pages worth of EKGs. The good news is, I believe there was only one couplet and one triplet recorded over that entire month.

But there's also a new arrhythmia I'd never even heard of before: PNC. Premature Nodal Contraction occurs when the AV node fires before it receives the signal from the SA node to do so. This generates a wimpy QRS complex, a normal T wave, then back to the heart's regularly scheduled programming. I had a hard time evern finding any information about this type of premature contraction on the web - so hopefully that means it's also benign in nature.

So this morning I'm a little less confident in my ticker as I was just before I picked up those EKGs, and part of me wishes I hadn't even picked them up. But I'm trying to get back to that place where I was just a few days ago; trusting my cardiologist, knowing she got to see the worst that my heart has to offer, and her determining that what it was doing was not a cause for alarm.

And I know there's lots of people living with benign NSVT, and so far my heart hasn't produced that (that I know of), but I have to consider the possibility that down the road I'll be dealing with that extra acronym on my arrhythmia resumé. So I'll have to remember people like Mary, who has benign NSVT and is doing well, and Connie, who had NSVT for years before she had an ablation that more or less cured her.

And I'm getting there. Slowly.