My Heart's In the Right Place
Almost
I went in for my echocardiogram two days ago. That's where they use sonar to take pictures of the heart pumping away inside you.
The last time I had one done, they confirmed that my heart was tilted, leaning at an angle they told me was about sixty degrees (where ninety degrees is straight up, the normal configuration). In other words, I had about thirty degrees of tilt. That was eight or nine years ago. Now my heart has resumed a more normal position, having only a very slight tilt. The reason for the tilt is that I have a very large chest cavity, leaving plenty of room for my heart to move around.
My doctors have been after me to do a treadmill stress test for a couple of years. They finally got me to schedule one by telling me I had a suspicious faulty rythm to my heart. I have had a bum rythm since I was a teenager and people have been trying to get me to see doctors about it for most of five decades.
The heart consists of two large pumping chambers called ventricles and two smaller chambers above them called atria. A heart beat begins in the atria and is transmitted to the ventricles from them. There are normally 60 to 80 heartbeats per minute.
But the atria can twitch. They can vibrate at 400 to 600 beats per minute. The ventricles can't keep up but they do accelerate, usually to 110 to 180 beats per minute. This is tachycardia. Or the ventricles can react to the twitching atria by giving a big thump once in a while. Or, as in my case, the irregular beat called palpitations. Any of these could be accompanied by weakness, fatigue, dizziness, shortness of breath or chest pain. Well, I've been a bit short of breath from time to time for a while now. It may be time to consider a pacemaker or one of those machines to detect and deter the fibrillation with small shocks. Either can now be implanted with microsurgery. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
I read the cardiologist's stress test report yesterday. Nothing basically wrong, but he did observe some "signs of distress" that caused him to break off the test before reaching the goal. I felt fine and don't know what triggered his decision. Perhaps that's why he was so interested in my doing the echocardiogram.
I'll have the results in another three weeks or so. All I have for the moment is the technician's assurance that she saw nothing serious, just some minor signs of aging.
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Comments (3)
It's hard to get along without a heart.
I wonder how often your heart moves around in there....
Enlightening, as always! I have been trying to learn French. I can read it fairly easily and know what's going on because of its similarity nonverbally to Spanish. I love the woman's comment on you looking British and saying then that Americans are hopeless! We are very comfortable with English. In a wonderful history book on the British Isles by Professor Norman Davies, University of London, it is explained how the English have had to become accustomed to folks from other countries learning the English language and then using it against the English! I love that comment, too. There is always comic relief. Take heart!
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