well it hasn't been easy and it's not over yet but this is my check-in for six months
Post open heart surgery for the valve replacement
there's a link below to the three-month check-in and if you've already watched that you know that
at the end of the three months I had just gotten an ablation to try to fix the tachycardia I'd been
having for about six weeks about half of that three-month period what that meant is that my
heart was going into tachycardia at 125 or so beats a minute for several days on end I spent
about half those six weeks in tachycardia which meant that it's almost impossible to sleep because
you've got this thing thumping in your chest and it also means that your heart is not healing from
all the trauma the heart is just fatiguing more because it's over revving so your recovery is
actually getting set backwards but I'd had the ablation thought I was doing good a couple weeks
after the ablation I got clearance to start going to the gym and just living life well the second
day of quote unquote living life going to the gym meeting friends for lunch that I haven't seen
in months one of my friends decided that he was going to abbreviate the word covid with vid vid
which I assumed was short for video and tells me an hour into dinner that he's got covid and even
though he's over 50 and does government contracts he thought he would be cool and hip and type like
a teenager apparently so second day out I catch covet it was what I consider a mild case I had
a fever for say one day and then you know basic cold symptoms sore throat runny nose for about
a week or so once I was clear of covet I started going back to the gym swimming lifting and again
trying to catch up with friends that I hadn't seen in a long time but trying to do it safely
where it was in outdoor settings you know where you could be a safe distance you weren't in big
crowds and trying to be smart about it but also trying to start living life I literally spent
three months not going near anybody that wasn't a doctor a nurse or a pharmacist for all that period
so this was a little bit strange coming out of this because we'd already been on you know covid
lockdown for how long and now to be completely isolated for three months and start to go out
again it was a little bit strange but that's what happens when you go through a major surgery is
you sort of reprogram yourself and you have to find what you're comfortable doing what you're
not comfortable doing what you like what you don't like about two weeks after having covid one night
I was just sitting here on the couch and I was up a little bit later than I normally would have been
and my heart just boom ramped up to 100 beats a minute sitting still on the couch what it started
developing was a pattern that was not like it been before with the tachycardia that required the
ablation back then it would go into tachycardia of around 125 beats a minute for you know two three
days at a time and then stop for a couple days and then go back this time it would go into 100 beats
a minute almost exactly and I watched the pattern over about a week just to see if I could see any
Trends or what was causing it before I called the doctors it was always either 3 P.M or later in the
day it was always for almost exactly three hours and it was always after I'd been at rest either
lying down in fact sometimes while I was asleep or sitting down but I'd been at rest for at least a
couple hours before this would happen then what I started noticing as well is that if I were to get
up and go exercise mildly like go wash the car or some kind of activity but not swimming right
and if I were to do that it would come out of the tachycardia go back to the 87 to 90 or whatever
doing the activity and then when I was done with the activity it would either be gone or it would
come back up again so doing activity actually normalized it and lowered the heart rate as a
result so it's a really strange thing so they put me back on amiodarone as much as we didn't
really like to but it was the best thing we had for stabling the heart rhythm so I was taking
the one pill a day and I had one more episode of it about a week after I started taking the drug
again now while on this medication I was noticing that my resting heart rate say during sleep I was
actually averaging you know mid 30s mid to upper 30s for an average heart rate for the whole night
of sleep which is getting pretty low but I also knew that the drugs I'd been taking would slow
down your resting heart rate so I wasn't terribly concerned about it in fact one night I actually
noticed that I was only at 32 beats a minute lying in bed at rest so I got out the oxygen
sensor and I noticed that even in the low 30s for a heart rate this thing said I still had 97
oxygen so I really wasn't that concerned I made the mistake and I apologize to whoever saw it of
posting a picture of my heart rate in the low 30s and then I went to bed because a couple people saw
it got really concerned tried to get a hold of me I was out cold it wasn't until my phone was
blasting light in my room on the third call that I picked it up and it was the local EMS sending
an ambulance over to my house because somebody got really concerned I wasn't answering and had that
low of a heart rate and she'd called the ambulance and had him on the way so I had to cancel that and
apologize to everybody took the post down but I knew it was my normal at that period but to
the average person or even you know clinically trained people that's not good so after taking
one pill a day for a couple weeks whatever it was I asked the doctors if I could drop down to half
a pill and maybe see if that really low heart rate wouldn't come up a little bit so while I'm having
the discussions with the doctor about the Rhythm another thing I'd brought up at the suggestion
of another nurse I know was electrolyte balance and so I asked him to do an electrolyte panel
which they did and it showed everything as normal but then again I'm in an abnormal state so maybe
normal amounts of salts and that aren't enough and I wasn't using salt on food I wasn't eating that
much so I was getting really minimal salt intake compared to a quote-unquote normal diet now I
wasn't outside working sweating all day either but the heart is still healing and it may need
a little bit more so at the time we dropped down to half a pill a day the doctors also put me on
a magnesium supplement every day I also started using more salt on my food as I cook trying to
get more salt in my system and see if that made any difference now the thing that my sister had
brought up who does keto coaching is that she found some information that says that a strict
keto diet could be linked to electrolyte imbalance which could cause heart palpitations muscle ache
cramping and even this doctor said it lowered his testosterone levels even a little bit his
conclusion as a doctor was that strict keto does not allow insulin spikes and you need some insulin
spikes to maintain your body's Health stability so in addition to the Magnesium pill I talked to
a couple other folks I know that have done keto for quite a while and asked them have you ever
seen heart palpitations electrolyte imbalance and do you do a cheat meal every few days to try to
get an insulin Spike to settle things out one of them who is a nurse said no she does not do
the cheat meals but she does listen to her body when it needs salt she will literally wake up in
the morning and put salt in her hand and eat the salt out of her hand because it that's what her
body feels like it needs the other individual I talked to that's been doing keto for a while said
yes that she did have the electrolyte imbalance and the palpitations and achiness and all this so
she she went to a cheap meal every three to four days whatever and she also added in an
electrolyte supplement so she gave me the name of that and I've been adding that to my diet as well
now in terms of adding a cheat meal I want to do it at a healthy level so what I did was bought a
month's worth of the glucose monitoring system from nutrisense that I wear back here and I've
been using that to insert a cheat meal of some type and look at what it does to the glucose
Spike to know what it's doing for my insulin Spike and the goal here that I'm trying to get
to is to figure out what kind of a meal is enough to give a decent insulin Spike but not going too
much to where it might be counterproductive to my health so that's been a tool I've been using
as well basically at this point I'm a little bit desperate to try to fix the Rhythm and I'm trying
any possible Avenue and explore any idea that I may come up with to try to keep normal and healthy
so amidst all this I had my last checkup with the doctor and what he said is look if the half a pill
of the amiodarone is working let's just do that for three to four months then come back and see
me we'll do another EKG and see how you're doing I told him I did not like the sound of that because
it is very stressful at a time where you're supposed to be relaxed
to have to worry about whether your heart is broken to know whether it's beyond repair it's
getting worse or it's healed that's a huge burden for your brain to deal with every day and so what
I suggested to him is hey we've got two weeks of no tachycardia on the half a pill let me just cut
to zero pills if the tachycardia comes back then we know we have a problem that we need
to fix somehow or we need to know that this is unfortunately what I'm going to have to deal
with for my remaining years but if it doesn't come back then we know it's fixed and it was
just a matter of needing more time to heal which very well may be the case or the electrolytes may
have helped too he agreed so as of right now I've been off all the amiodarone for about two and a
half weeks now I've not had another tachycardia but my rhythm is still not normal I've had a
couple possible afibs show up when I was in for the echo review a few days ago that doctor was
looking and still found junctional Rhythm as well so my heart is definitely not normal some days
are better than other for my breathing capacity the ejection fraction from my echo was only 45
percent now normal is say 50 to 55 and it's come up because at the time of the ablation that doctor
said that it was worse than the 43 it had been two years ago when I had the hole in the heart
so it's on the rise he said it's just been through so much trauma that even now six months after
the original surgery it still probably isn't normalized he said it could be a year and he
said six months from now let's check it again and whatever it is then is probably going to be about
as good as you're ever going to be and it's not that your 45 is bad we hope it gets better than
that but at some point your heart is limited and whatever you get that's you know gonna be what
you got so at this point do I trust the heart yeah about as much as I'd trust a girl that's
taken yogurt deposits in the men's room stall at the local bar and then tells me that she cut back
to just giving handies in the parking lot no I don't trust it but I'm trying to do everything
I can to squeeze as much life out of it as I can right now my primary focus is health and making
the most of the time I have so when I go to bed at night I want to know that I did everything I could
to be healthy and everything I could to be happy that day my days right now are pretty structured
around health I wake up I go swim I have breakfast and then I go take a nap then eventually I get up
and I go to to the gym and lift weights and then I get something to eat or a protein shake whatever
and then I eat and then I go take a nap and then I do whatever makes me happy until bedtime that
may be taking the dog to the lake maybe taking a motorcycle for a ride or doing something that
I'm able to do wrenching wise or watch movies play guitar all about keeping relaxed and positive and
I found myself that there are situations and even people that don't have a positive impact on me
that have kind of a negative impact on me at times and I've had to just put them on mute right now I
have to be highly focused on me getting better if I let these negative influences in my life where
it throws my heart into a bad rhythm again and causes me more health problems what's not good
for anybody so this is the time to be extremely selfish which I'm pretty good at let's be honest
and just focus on me getting healthy and if that hurts someone else's feelings that's really just
too bad because if I don't do these things now I won't be around to enjoy their company later
anyway I'm tracking everything I can think to do on the computer from my sleep patterns that
I get from the watch to exercises to what I ate to what the glucose responses are to the oxygen
levels and heart rates everything you can imagine I also bought a new Samsung watch just to see if
that's a better way to track all these Health stats than the way I'm doing it with my polar
and the computer so I'm trying to make the best use of what technology is available to me as well
in terms of making sure that I'm monitoring my health and making sure I can do everything I can
to try to get healthy one good thing that has come out of this but since I'm basically living
a Bro Science lifestyle of Jim tan laundry I'm leaner than I've been in a long time I'm probably
closer to the elusive six-pack than I've been in years so yeah my followers were dead tomorrow but
at least I'll look good laying there and one of the appointments I had a very serious talk with
the NP and I said look I don't want the roses and unicorns version I want a straight answer as best
as you can and I know this is a tough question but what's the real expectation of my longevity
at this point you guys have already told me that there's no way anybody's going to cut me open
again that's that ship has sailed it's so scarred up in there nobody's going to want to touch that
again fair enough so this is the last open heart that I would have that's done so if I get through
this Rhythm stuff and if nothing else happens like another hole in the heart rips or anything
else and I actually get through the life of this valve that puts me 10 years from now let's say
maybe 11 or 12 if I'm really lucky so that alone is a bit of a stretch but as possible and she said
well yeah at that point then we could put another valve through the femoral and I said well hold on
if the valve fails because it's leaking then yes you could put a new valve in and seal it
that makes sense but the way my last valve failed where it was so stiff it wouldn't
open all the way if you put another valve inside of it it's not going to force the other one open
so that's it right and she thought about it she said no you're right it will depend on
the failure mechanism so I said okay so I might get 10 or 11 years out of this valve
under everything being ideal the possibility of getting a new valve in 10 years is Slim let's say
but possible but after that that's about it right because I told her flat out in the beginning I
said I am looking at buying a Ferrari that I really can't afford and I know that normal
circumstances might say that silly but to be honest I'm not going to be around forever and
if that's what would make me happy then why not and I'm just trying to get a feel for
is that the right move for me or not I know you can't necessarily make that decision for
me but I'd kind of like to know objectively what am I dealing with for longevity here
she said look if you can afford it and it's not putting you out and you're still able to make your
mortgage and everything she said buy the Ferrari if that's what you want she said if I was you I
would make a five-year plan and just sort of plan that out and if you make it five more years then
make a new Five-Year Plan I said perfect that's what I need to know is that kind of information
thank you so I did go test drive a Ferrari 458 that was it drove incredible and hats off to
the sales guy that didn't scream or wet himself or anything on the test ride because I pushed
it hard but it was a fun car beautiful I don't exactly have the space for it but I could have
maybe moved something around or found an off-site storage or something but ultimately it needed ten
thousand dollars worth of button Replacements that would take three months and they were only going
to knock five grand off for it plus the interest rates just went up to nine and a half percent for
the loan so that wasn't the right choice so I've kind of temporarily abandoned the Ferrari for now
and just trying to think through of what do I want you know it's it's something that I have
to ask myself and frankly all of you should be asking yourself this too everybody should be
asking themselves what do I want to do with the rest of my life what's going to make me happy
because that's what should be driving us and I'm being forced to answer it more directly right now
because of my health situation but it's something everybody should be thinking about and I've never
been one to be risk adverse let's be honest you know we're over conservative with things
and I I love the freedom of being able to ride my motorcycle in the mountains at high speed at 12
000 feet and just let it go and leave it all out there I mean that's what I live for is
experiences like that and I can do that where a lot of people can't they have to hold back
and say well I can't do that because I have this or I have that whatever but I can just live wide
open which is great to me and now even more so than before because I have more limitations on
time and it's more important for me now to do whatever I want if something doesn't make me
happy and I can avoid it then I'm getting rid of it and if I find something I really enjoy then
I'm going to do that until it starts negatively impacting other aspects of my life ultimately
the whole concept of pushing negative things out of your life finding what you love and do that
to the hilt whether you've got a year left or a century left that's the whole secret to life right
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