Speaking from the heart

For the most part, I got a clean bill of health, although my doctor had suggested a 30 day heart monitor. That would be too inconvenient I felt, so we’ll hold off another month and see how things go.

I admit to being a typical male, i.e., I have a built-in aversion to seeing doctors about what I consider “little” things. For more than a year now, I would occasionally have these little heart flutters, murmurs, fluctuations, whatever you want to call them. It would feel like my heart was either speeding up or slowing down. Sometimes they’d be accompanied by a moment of lightheadedness, sometimes not. They’d only last about a second then go away, and they were so infrequent and irregular as to have no pattern of trackability. I shrugged it off.

Then I had bad news about some friends, and another guyI knew, and then just other guys my own age and it made me realize I might need to take this stuff seriously.

Back in April I had my annual physical and told my regular doctor about it. He referred me to a cardiologist—who ironically has the same last name as my mother’s maiden name—who first asked a battery of questions, then ordered a 24-hour heart monitor. For a day I was wired for sound and carrying a little device on my hip just bigger and similar looking to an iPod. Co-workers even thought it was until I told them about the ten wires attached to my chest. I turned that in a day later and while there, got an echo cardiogram, kind of like a sonogram for the heart. Lying on my side on an examination table, they took pictures of my heart beating for several minutes. Then I left and lived my life for a month, until Tuesday.

The results showed nothing too out of the ordinary. My heart size and functioning are all within the range of what is defined as normal and the monitor and cardiogram showed no abnormalities. But I do still occasionally get lightheaded moments, which is why the doc wanted the extended wear monitor. But I’m just not ready to have my life that disrupted at the moment.

I’m concerned, but not worried. I recently heard it said that the older you get the more death becomes a part of your life. That does not mean an obsession with death, just an awareness of its inevitability. I have more years behind me than I do in front of me. Physiological changes are happening all the time at this point. I note all this and move on.