I SO love the Nike + iPod thing I got for Christmas - it accurately measures how far you've run and gives you (some) progress updates, on-demand updates, and when you kick a little extra ass? I found out today that Lance Armstrong has a pre-recorded congratulatory message for you.

So cool.

And I always hated running when I didn't know how far I was running, only how long - and so I never knew if I was making progress or not - with this I can run anywhere and know how far I've gone. Makes for more interesting runs! :D

And I had a few skips while I ran. Big deal. So does everyone.

My pace wasn't fast by any stretch - 9:03/mile over the whole 6, faster at the start, slower at the end, but it felt really good.

"If you want love you've got to give a little..."

I like Sammy Hagar. The musician, but more so the person. So many times, for so many things, be it social relationships, business relationships, political relationships, if you aren't getting what you want out of them, it might pay to first look at what you're putting into them. The song Give to Live, whether you like his music or not, provides some pretty valuable life lessons, I think. I don't mean to go all music nerd on you, but I think this is valuable, you know?

"If you want faith you just believe a little..."

The people that take part in this site do so because they want to. They share their experiences and their successes and failures in the hopes that through sharing that knowledge and their experience it'll help others, too. There's some give, some take. Nobody's owed anything.

"If you want peace, turn your cheek a little..."

I get personal, private requests all the time to help this person or that one in getting over/through/past some heart rhythm issue. And if I didn't like helping others, I wouldn't have launched this site in the first place. But if I ever get the sense that someone feels entitled, or maybe takes my time and effort for granted?

I wanna send them this song from Sammy Hagar. You can't just take. You have to give some, too.

"You've got to give, you've got to give, you've got to give...to live."

I knew it was coming.

I knew I was tempting fate by staying up until crazy hours of the morning, mortgaging my sleep for progress on projects I was working on.

But I kept skipping sleep. And them wham, a few days ago, the skips started, hot and heavy, and yesterday I was having hours of a mixed bag of bigeminy, trigeminy...never having more than 4 normal beats in a row before a skip jumped in.

But I went to bed early last night (though not before fixing the problem with this site!), slept in, and am just lounging about, casually tackling work tasks. And I'm just about back to normal. I've probably had 200 or so PVCs so far today, but that's a huge drop from days before. So I'll take it. Happily.

Wheee! This can be crazy sometimes, huh? So valuable to find out your triggers and be able to address them when something goes wrong.

Because sweet Jeebus the incoming spam is like a tsunami. Thankfully, most of you don't see even a bit of it, because the site is pretty good at sniffing out spam threads and posts before they go live, and holding them aside for me to look over before I allow them.

But some still sneak through. If they do? Please help me keep the site clean by clicking the little "Report a Post" icon at the top right of any post that looks spammy. The icon to click looks like this:

And when you click it, you'll be taken to a page that asks you to fill in some information about the post you're reporting - that information and information about the post gets sent to a special forum that I have access to, where I can address these reported posts individually.

Help keep Skipping Hearts healthy! Report spam, please. I need everyone's :helpsmilie:. Thanks.

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:

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....

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.

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.

When this site was launched I wanted to be able to have a steady flow of informative and well-referenced articles to help people wade through what's fact and what's fiction when it comes to their heart health.

But I've been bogged down lately and haven't finished a decent article in a couple weeks. Why? Getting it right takes a lot more work on some of these articles than I thought it would. For example, I'm finishing up an article about Aloe Vera and whether it can help treat palpitations. It's taken me nearly a week worth of evenings, finding relevant studies, but also checking the credentials of those who recommend it. And that can be more work than the article itself! Finding out if a doctor is actually a doctor, if their practice is where they say it is, if their claims about their experience are accurate or wildly exaggerated.

It's tough. Well, more time consuming than tough.

So, my apologies for not having more articles out there, but know that I'm pounding away on the keyboard here, with 50+ tabs open at a time in my Firefox browser, trying to get all the facts straight before I share them with you.

Jeff

I'm not sure there are too many benefits to having lived through years of PVCs, but if there's at least one, it's got to be finding coping mechanisms and tactics to reduce or eliminate them.

Those of you who are just experiencing your first bout with palpitations, skipped beats and extra beats, I envy you a little (because your "bad day" is probably what I'd call "Tuesday"), but my heart also goes out to you, because like you, there was a great deal of fear instilled in me that first day I suffered through some premature ventricular contractions.

One of my de-stressing and coping mechanisms when I'm having lots of PVCs is to go outside on a clear night and look at the stars. I'm not an astronomy buff, but I do own a telescope and have been fascinated with space since I was very young.

As I sit on one of our patio chairs, eyes trained on the heavens, I think about all that's going on up there. Is that Jupiter I see to the West? A storm bigger than Earth has been rolling around Jupiter's surface for at least 400 years. And Mars currently has some small, roving robots scouring it's surface, courtesy of the NASA. So much undiscovered history there.

And is that the Pleiades star cluster? I wonder if there are planets orbiting those stars. Probably. I wonder if any of those planets have some odd, tiny little bug crawling around on them. Or maybe a little plant. And in a hundred millennia, that little plant's great granddaughter might be something like an Oak tree.

All these amazing things, out in space. And here I am, one little human, worried about an upcoming project or the mortgage on our home. In the truly grand scheme of things, my worries are pretty small by comparison.

So small in fact, that I'm not as worried about them. And what do you know? My PVCs are starting to fade away.

I posted last night that I was sending some good vibes one person's way. Recently she had her medical file sent to Dr. Andrea Natale, an electrophysiologist that has been called a "rock star" in the field of cardiac electrophysiology for his ability to solve very complex heart rhythm problems, and for his success rates, innovations in the field and his teachings. Every year Dr. Natale spends time teaching other doctors how to use the most advanced equipment available and utilize the newest techniques to help their arrhythmia patients.

Adrienne sounds like she's at the end of her rope after a long, difficult struggle with her numerous rhythm issues, and has pinned what's left of her hopes on Dr. Natale taking on her case and trying to help her. But since her cardiologist that has been treating her has more or less backed away from her, since he doesn't know what to do to help her now, Adrienne is prepared for the worst, that Dr. Natale will decide not to take on her case.

Because Adrienne's been such a caring, helpful person in holding the hands of other frightened arrhythmia sufferers, it seemed wrong for me to just sit there and let fate play it's hand.

So I sent an email to Dr. Natale, explaining how Adrienne is such a gift to the people she's touched, and that she deserves better, and that I hoped he would take her case. To my utter amazement, within the hour I had a return email from Dr. Natale. He said he would do his best to make her better, and that he would let me know when he saw her.

?

With all you hear of doctors and their egos, in this field that is so crowded with brilliant people, one of those who stand at the top of the pile was there, Saturday night, responding to an email from someone he'd never met, promising to do what he could to help.

I'm feeling pretty good about all this right about now, and especially about Adrienne and Dr. Natale.