Friday, August 8, 2014

Day 217

It's day to day.

I felt 'decent' most of today. I took two naps in the sun. But every time I had to walk (and I do that a lot) the vibrations hit my breastbone like a Van Damme side-kick. I had to come to a complete stop twice just to stabilize and re-group.

Good news is that I took no pain meds today, just the anticoagulants.

I have also been reading up on the issue(s), especially the latest wrinkle, the ejection fraction. What a great name for a band! EF, is the percentage of blood that one's heart pumps from the ventricle towards needy body parts, and in our case, triathletes, that usually means muscles. And brain. My EF was estimated to be around 45%, with anything over 50% being OK.

I asked my electro-cardiologist the morning after the procedure what all this meant to my long term goals (with a straight face), and she hemmed and hawed a touch before suggesting that I might get a 'better' response from the lead cardiologist. Not that she was evading the issue or skirting from counsel, she simply felt that we need to do some more testing before we get the detailed data we all seek, and that her area of expertise had set the stage nicely for exactly that.

She did go on to say, with some promoting, that while ALL exercise is good, for the time being, and after at least a week of recovery,  I might be better off blocking more LSD sessions than Super Eight Max-outs.

And I totally agree. If you were to hold a Glock 9 to my temple and demand that I go to 100% for any duration, a loud and decisive bang would ensue. I could give you, today, RIGHT NOW, maybe .0005%. For a nano-second.

And then I would be back in the sun napping. Or maybe back in the ER.

So it's day to day. And I got no problem with dat.

Pic: On Sunday I was a shadow of my former climbing self. But we made it!

No comments: