More Health Stuff….
It probably appears as though my blog is only for my health updates. Unfortunately, this will be the case every 6 Months for (hopefully) a long while to come!
My latest medical visit was to my cardiologist for my 6 monthly checkup. Everything went well but because I reported some minor chest pain to him, he decided it would be a good idea for me to do an Echo Stress Test.
If you don’t know what’s involved in and Echo Stress Test, they took an ultrasound of my heart while I lay on my side. The head of the ultrasound had to be pressed hard up against the side of my ribcage – and let me tell you it hurt! While this was happening, I had electrodes stuck to me so that they could record an ECG of my heart’s rhythm during the test.
After the ultrasound, it was onto the treadmill for some work. The treadmill is run by a program called, ‘Bruce’ which speeds up the rate and incline every 3 minutes until you’ve had enough. I lasted 13 minutes (my best previously was around 11 minutes) at which time I was jogging at 8.5 Km/h at a 17% incline. Although only doing this part of the test for a minute, I had spent the previous 12 minutes building up to a 3 minute stint walking at 6.6 Km/h at a 14% incline. It’s pretty hard work let me tell you!
Immediately following the treadmill workout, I had to lay on my side again so that they could take ultrasound images of my heart after being stressed. Try to picture yourself after reaching your optimum heart rate, lying on your side with ECG electrodes stuck to you, breathing heavily and the doctor says to you, ‘Hold your breath’. Easily said than done, but I had to do this on 3 occasions – pretty hard to do!
The end result of all that was that everything was great. My heart reacted the same at rest as it did under stress, my blood pressure reacted as it should, and the ECG showed all the proper patterns. All in all, a great relief to know that everything is as it should be. All I have to do is make sure that I look after myself as I have been and my good health should continue.