I had two health appointments last night and this morning: my follow-up sleep study to see how well I’m doing on my CPAP machine, and my follow-up cardiologist appointment to see how I’m doing after my surgery.
I didn’t manage to get all the glue washed out of my hair from the electrodes that were glued there for my sleep study last night. I had 16 of them attached to my head and face and other body parts. This time, though, I had fewer things to deal with; I had only one microphone glued to my neck rather than 2, and no breathing tubes, because I had the machine.
One of the things they mentioned, that I noticed, too; I have dreams again. I’m actually sleeping long enough to fall into REM sleep and have dreams, which I wasn’t doing before; their study showed I wasn’t getting any REM sleep at all. This had probably been going on for years actually, which you can tell if you look at the dreams section of my journal, where there’s a gap of about three years between dreams that I remember enough to write down. So the return of dreaming is a really Good Thing, as Martha would say.
The cardiologist’s appointment was really short and not much happened. I expected to have a electrocardiogram, but they didn’t do one. And Dr. Yee didn’t even realize I had the heart valve surgery; he had to take notes. He listened to my heart and said everything sounded good. I should be walking a mile a day, or biking, etc. I also should be able to lift whatever I normally lifted before surgery. I’m supposed to see him again in on October 17th at 9:00 am and they’ll do an electrocardiogram then, and then again once a year for the next several years to monitor how my heart is doing.
While I was in the waiting room, I was watching the health channel they have on TV — same one that I wrote about before, with the dog trained to detect a woman’s epileptic seizures before she had them, to warn her so she could prepare. Turns out the channel I was watching is Accent Health. Here’s a news article on the subject.
I made notes this time because the program today was on healthy eating; they said studies show that lycopene in tomatoes can reduce women’s risk of heart disease by 30% if you eat 1/4 cup of tomato sauce a day. I wonder how that translates to V-8 juice.