Health

Cardiac Catheterization

The other day, I wrote about my recent stress test, commenting at the conclusion: “It was all very interesting. I should know my results in a few days, but I’m optimistic.” Well, I spoke a bit too soon on that one. The results of the stress test were rather perplexing to my cardiologist. It seems as though some areas of my heart aren’t getting enough circulation, which doesn’t make any sense to him; I’m not a candidate for narrowed arteries at this stage of the game. My blood pressure isn’t high; my cholesterol isn’t high; I’m way too young. So I’m going to have an outpatient procedure to see what’s going on, and potentially fix any problems – Cardiac Catheterization. I go in to do this on Friday and will be in the hospital most of the day. I’ll have the weekend for the 2 day recovery period.

I found all this out last week, but I had to tell my parents before I blogged about it, so they wouldn’t read about it here first and get pissed at me. I was pretty freaked out about it, but I’m calmer now; there’s not a whole lot I can do other than what I’ve already been doing – eating tons of vegetables and healthy stuff, and exercising my ass off.

The absolute worst-case scenario is that I would have to go back in and have another open-heart procedure. I survived that already; it doesn’t scare me now.

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Stress Tests

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Ooo – I haven’t done a real blog post (as opposed to link posts) in quite some time. Well, let me remedy that. As part of the “ruling things out” process when it comes to my reoccurring bouts with pleurisy, my pulmonologist asked me to go back to my cardiologist and rule out my heart as a cause. I went in a week or so ago and had an echocardiogram and saw Dr. Trippi, and he said he thinks my valve repair seemed to be just fine. He had me do a blood test that confirmed it. The one last piece of the puzzle was having me do a stress test to rule out heart disease and heart attacks as the cause; I did that yesterday. The test takes about 3.5 – 4 hours to do, so I took a personal day for it.

By the way, during my personal day, I discovered a cozy cafe near the medical center, and I also passed by a CBD dispensary like the stiiizy dispensary, adding a unique touch to my day. This test was different than the stress echo that I took in the past, where they had me run on a treadmill and then looked at my heart with the ultrasound.

 

Heart Diagram

In this test, I had a radioactive liquid (Cardiolyte) injected via an IV, then climbed into a machine that looked like and MRI, but was actually a giant Geiger counter. I had to lie there for 16 minutes while the cameras moved around me recording the flow of blood to my heart. Then I ran on a treadmill until my heart got to 150 beats per minute, had another injection of the Cardiolyte, and got scanned again to tell the difference between my resting and active heart. It was all very interesting. I should know my results in a few days, but I’m optimistic.

What was scary was talking to the other patients in the waiting room. I happened to be sitting next to one of those people who likes to chat with strangers – a woman who was clearly terrified of the procedure (understandably, considering why she was there). She started talking to me and to a couple sitting on our little area; the man was there because he was getting his heart looked at; he declined to say what was wrong, but she asked if he was just getting a check-up or if he was having problems, and he said because he was having problems. He was 52 (she was asking our ages) and he had had four heart attacks – the first at age 39. That certainly gave me pause. The chatty woman told us that she was there because she had an ongoing arrhythmia, and her family finally made her come in, because although she was in denial, her sister had died of a heart attack as well as both of her parents, and two of her brothers had them. It’s too bad none of her family was there, she was obviously scared as hell and just chatting up a storm because of it.

Anyway, the whole thing has made me think quite a bit. I’ve been eating a lot better lately, but I can up the ante on that. I’m eliminating sodas from my diet almost entirely and red meat, too. We’re using more olive oil (good fats) and I’m eating handfuls of walnuts as snacks. I’m going to try for fish three times a week, and more vegetables. I’m in the process of reading “You: The Owner’s Manual” and “You: On a Diet.” From what I can tell the diet is similar to exactly the same as that of a book I read several years ago – The Okinawa Program, which was a study of the incredibly long-lived people of the Island of Okinawa, and why they are so remarkably healthy into their old age.

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I feel like shit

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In the myriad of doctors appointments I have, I managed to forget the most important one – my Monday appointment with my new primary care physician. It was scheduled so far from when I actually made the appointment that I completely lost track of it- I thought it was on April 28th, which it turns out is actually supposed to be my pulmonologist’s appointment. And I see my cardiologist on April 12th at 1 p.m. And I’m completely pissed off at google calendar – I had it set to remind me two days before the appointment, and I didn’t get a reminder.
So I had to reschedule for my regular doctor, and the woman in the office was completely bitchy. I asked why they didn’t call to remind me of the appointment, and she said they have more important things to do, and that I need to learn to manage my time. Thanks. If you made appointments closer to the time that people ask for them, they might fucking remember them, thank you.
I couldn’t get an appointment before the April 16th, which means I’m seeing the cardiologist before my regular doctor, which is bound to be a complete and utter clusterfuck.
I really need one of these damn doctors to round up the others, put their heads together, and figure out what the fucking problem is, because at this point, my diagnoses are more accurate than any of theirs. I’m so fucking sick of being sick.

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Rheumatoid Arthritis and Wheat Intolerance

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A friend pointed out to me that she has Rheumatoid Arthritis (which I’ve written about recently), and that under the care of her doctor, she has eliminated wheat from her diet to control her RA symptoms – because they’re triggered by a wheat intolerance. So I’ve been doing a lot of searches on the subject, which will be showing up in my regular links lists tonight.

I really need to talk to my doctor about wheat intolerance and the link to RA, because there’s a lot of information there about symptoms that sounds strikingly familiar. But from everything I’m reading, simply cutting wheat out of my diet without getting tested for wheat intolerance first wouldn’t be a good thing at all, because I would need to carefully supplement my nutrition at the same time, or I’d have other problems, so it’s not something I should just jump in and do.

But this gives me some hope that maybe if this is the source of the inflammation and is aggravating my joints and lungs, I could manage my health issues without long-term medication and maintenance, which would be awesome. Not that going on a wheat-free diet sounds easy if that’s the ultimate solution, but the medication route certainly has it’s bad points.

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Meredith Grey’s Heart Surgery

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I know it’s just a television show, but, really. There’s no way they could have her on heart bypass for over an hour, and then have her snuggling in bed with McDreamy not long after. That would fracking hurt – it was weeks/months before Stephanie and I could spoon in bed. I adore the show, but just a tad more realism, could we?

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The Whole Story

So apparently, sometime recently the furnace in my old house went out, and the pipes froze and burst. One of the people viewing the house found this, and the contractor they brought with them to see it shut off the water this morning. So the furnace needs replace, the pipes need lots of work, and more than likely the offer I had in the works to buy my house will go down the tubes.

On top of this, I’m having yet another bout of pleurisy and round of drugs to combat it — I’ve been taking the prescription steroid Prednisone. The working theory of my pulmonologist is that I have early onset Rheumatoid Arthritis, which causes joint inflammation and lung inflammation, and if left untreated causes severe joint damage and other problems. I’ll scheduled to go back to see the guy in April, but if I keep having reoccurring problems I think I’ll need to go back in sooner.
The Prednisone is both a good and bad thing — it certainly makes me feel way better – my stiff knees and joints go away, the pain in my lungs goes away, my endless stuffy head/runny nose goes away. My mood is way, way better – I feel great, have tons of energy.

The downside is that I’m ravenously hungry all the time, and even when I’m eating healthy, I gain lots of weight. I’ve gained 30 pounds since Christmas time, when I started taking the new medication. And aside from actual weight gain, I’m also retaining water, which is as bad or worse. And I’ve been exercising regularly, too, which you would think would help – but not so much really.

Basically I’m having a really crappy day.

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Must Be Naptime

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I’m home for the second day in a row with pleurisy and a head cold. Today, though, I’m back on the helpful prescription, so I should back in business soon. Lucy and Huckleberry are snoozing on the bed upstairs, and Dru and Annabelle are curled up and dreaming on the trunk in the library. Spike is nestled under his blanket on the klakbo chair nearby. I’m pretty sleepy so I’m going to nap too.

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Emergency Room Visit

I’m having another flare-up of pleurisy (this would be the fifth since my surgery, if we’re counting) and last night I was having a lot of trouble breathing. I also had a different symptom than previously — I had a sharp pain on the left side of my chest on Sunday evening. It went away after several hours, but the breathing difficulty stayed, and got worse. So last night we headed out to the emergency room at Methodist rather than the Immediate Care place, just to be sure that there wasn’t anything wrong.
The ER was really busy last night, so we ended up stuck in a bed in a hallway rather than in our own room. (Actually, they’re not really “rooms” at Methodist, but curtained off areas with numbers above them on the ceiling). They hooked me up to the EKG and ran a couple of tests, did some blood work and took a chest X-ray, and determined that I wasn’t having any sort of heart problems, and that I was having another lung inflammation. Unfortunately, all of this took awhile because the doctors and nurses had to run off to help critical patients, which was understandable given how busy they were. But it meant we waiting a long time to see someone and get information. We were also stuck in the intersection of two hallways, so we got more than an eyeful of some of the events. It seemed sort of interesting at first, but turned into a grim spectator sport that we couldn’t get away from.
First we saw a near-collision as some nurses hustled a bed down the hall one direction on a crash-course with another bed coming from the other direction… and when we called out to get them to slow down, we realized they were hustling the one guy out of the room because he was dead. Yikes.
Then we saw the Lifeline helicopter crew race a bed by with a guy by who had some pretty major facial trauma. Fortunately Stephanie was reading and didn’t look up to see him, but I glanced up and got an eyeful I didn’t want.
Then they wheeled a young guy past with a policeman closely in tow.
Then they wheeled a woman in a wheel chair past — they were looking for a bed for her because she was in serious shape and they needed to work on her. They ended up moving a woman out of a “room” nearby into the hallway because she was going to be admitted soon. When the doctors started talking to the woman in the wheelchair, it because kinda obvious from her answers that she’d had a pretty major heart attack and was in bad, bad shape. They got her into the room, pulled the curtain, and started working on her — there were four nurses, four doctors and other people racing in and out from behind the curtain, carrying supplies, a crash cart, other monitors and machines. That went on for quite awhile, while her dazed, freaked out husband sat quietly in a chair on the other side of Stephanie, watching what they were doing and clutching her bag of clothes.
At this point they knew that I should get released, but we needed the doctor to do the paperwork, and he was in the room with the woman, so we had to sit and wait, although I was pretty desperate to get out of there at that point. My lungs were absolutely on fire, and I needed to get to the pharmacy to get the anti-inflammatory, but we were stuck until we could get the doctor, so I tried to read, and relax so I could breathe. It helps to sit still; once I’m moving around it’s harder to catch my breath, and I can’t take deep breaths at all. If I sit still and relax, I can breath shallow breaths without feeling the firey pain hit.
A different Lifeline Medevac crew went past, with a different patient with a bloody, torn up face. Some doctors wheeled in a guy who had a broken neck, canvassing the nurses for a room to put him in, and discussing between which vertebrae the break had occurred.
Eventually the doctor helping me came and got my paperwork ready, which I signed, but I still needed to get my IV removed, and all the nurses were helping heart attack lady. So we sat for a while longer, and I picked off all the EKG sticky monitors and got ready to go. If I could have figured out how to take out my IV myself, I would have, I was so tired of sitting there.
After about another hour, they finally got heart attack lady ready to move to the Cath Lab so cardiologists could work on her, and our nurse came to help me, while the doctors went to the woman’s husband and explained that she had had a massive heart attack and that they were taking her elsewhere for more help. The poor man looked like he was ready to break down, and we felt awful that we were there listening to it, but we had nowhere to go.
I got my IV out, we went to CVS and got my drugs – which have been a major help – and we came home. And after watching that woman have a heart attack in front of us, I don’t think I ever want to eat a cheeseburger again. Wow I do not want to be her someday.
UPDATE: I’m getting a referral from my regular doctor to see a pulmonologist (sp?) er – lung doctor so I we figure out why this lung thing keeps happening, and I can figure out how to avoid dragging my girlfriend to the doctor all the time.

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No Change!

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The message on the answering machine from my cardiologist says that there’s no change in my heart and everything is fine. Yay! I’m apparently a paranoid lunatic for worrying about it. But I’m a healthy paranoid lunatic, and that’s what matters. That’s quite a relief.

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Cardio Appointment

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Okay, I have to write about this, because it’s been worrying me for a day, and I have get it out of my head. I went to my cardiologist yesterday for my “routine once a year post-surgery” visit. I had a vague expectation that I would be getting and EKG and seeing the doctor, and that’s pretty much what they repeated when I went in. However, the nurse guy who said this when I entered the exam room was brand new, so it’s possible he didn’t have the complete scoop on what the tests were supposed to be.

After I met with Dr. Trippi, though, he mentioned he wanted an echo-cardio gram, and it seemed sort of like he was tacking that on at the last minute. And then he went to find one of the echo technicians, and there was a wait while they figured out what testing room I could use, which also seemed like the test hadn’t been pre-scheduled.

When they were taking me from the exam room to the testing room, I could hear Dr. Trippi transcribing his notes about me in his office across the hall, which is rather creepy to hear a disembodied voice speaking about you: “Patient is Mineart, age 38….” I tried to hang back and hear what else he was saying, but the nurse was too far ahead and I had to catch up.

It was kind of a difficult echo – basically an ultrasound of my heart. They had trouble seeing everything, especially getting good pictures of my mitral valve, so it was somewhat painful. And at the end of it, the echo technician said something that struck me as odd — I don’t know if I can quote word-for-word, but it was something like “How long did they tell you the repair was good for?” And of course, I had been told that it was supposed to last until forever, so that’s what I told her.

So they bundled me all up and sent me out, but I of course don’t know what they saw on the echo, or if there’s some sort of problem that they didn’t tell me about. And it’s been worrying me ever since. Gf course, it could be I’m assuming too much or imagining things, and I hope that’s all it is. And I shouldn’t worry until I get more concrete information. But it’s sort of hard to write something funny and entertaining right now.

Update: It didn’t really turn out to be anything, thankfully.

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