My heart is fine

Yesterday I had my stress test.

It started with a few at rest measures that were really high. I am still having enough anxiety that my resting heart rate was 112 bpm. That is super high for me. I had an at rest cardiac ultrasound.

I then had several dozen sticky leads attached to my abdomen, a blood pressure cuff attached to my arm and some ultrasound goop to boot. I walked at increasing speed on an increasingly inclining treadmill until my heart rate topped 155. After I hit the target heart rate I got a 2nd cardiac ultrasound to compare to my at rest cardiac ultrasound.

The results were very encouraging.

My heart is in great shape. I was dismissed from the cardiologist and told not to come back unless I have future chest pains.

That was a great relief.

Even better from my perspective is that I have been given permission to work out again. Normally When I am stressed I go running and then feel better. As you know I have been pretty stressed of late. Because of the chest pains and the lack of surety about my heart I was told to take it easy. Take it easy means don't go running. BLARG!

But now...now I can run and I am hoping the return to that normalcy will speed along my recovery.

Today I will get the results back from all my blood tests and see my gp for an analysis of my state after being off the meds for a week.

I don't know what I want to happen. Clearly I am still abnormally anxious. Additionally the medication troubles I have had this year have made me extremely leery of any more hit and miss prescription experimentation.

On a fairly entertaining note, because of moving and talking and relaxing on the treadmill my heart preformed much better under stress than it did at rest. The Dr. was quite surprised by that.