Wednesday 11/27/2024
Today I had an appointment with my cardiologist, Dr. DiBiase, at 10am. This was in part a routine checkup but since October I have been feeling occasional bouts of irregular heartbeats, which is of course concerning. I prepared for this in what — I realize in hindsight — was a rather nerdy way, but it was effective.
I take my blood pressure every morning and record it in a spreadsheet, with a column for a 14-day rolling average. For the last couple of months this has crept up by 5 or so, from 110/50 to 115/55, mostly due to occasional readings of 120. That bugged me, I thought the old monitor might be failing, so I bought a new blood pressure machine a few weeks ago (I can’t see that I mentioned it in the blog, which surprises me).
Anyway I splurged for the $200 one that also has an ECG readout. You pair your phone with it, and you hold metal contacts while the arm cuff is doing its thing, and you get an ECG trace on your phone. Which you can then export as a PDF and print out.
So one time last week that I was feeling my heart doing its bouncy thing I took an ECG, and then later in the day when my chest was being quiet as normal — it’s like most of the time I’m running on electricity but occasionally I switch over to diesel for a few minutes — I took another one. And exported them to PDF and printed them. So I sat down with the doctor and I could show her, see, this is when I feel normal,
and here’s when I feel peculiar,
What was obvious even to my untrained eye was, that the rhythm was not even in the second trace, there are short and long periods. She immediately said, Oh, those are PVC’s. I know the term (not polyvinyl chloride like PVC plumbing pipe, pre-ventricular contractions). I had a spell of those before, not sure when (but I would soon find out).
The short periods (two of them in the above trace) are early contractions. Then the heart gets some extra time to fill (the long periods following the short ones), which means it’s extra full when the next contraction comes, so you feel it as a heavy beat.
PVCs are not a serious issue, she said, unless there is too high a percentage of them. She’s typing away on her computer keyboard. So, I said, would we learn anything from me wearing a monitor? “I already typed in the order,” she said. So before I left the office I had this little button, a Zio monitor, adhered to my chest.
But thinking about this afterward — what kind of nerd am I, to go into the cardiologist carrying my own ECG readouts? How many of my neighbors here, including the retired college presidents and surgeons, could pair their phone with the monitor, take a reading, and then get the app to export the PDF and print it out?
Back home I read the Zio manual and following directions I download the Zio app. And I went to create an account, and it says, there is already an account for that email address. Really? I did the “forgot password” thing and logged in and sure enough, there are entries in the “diary” where you note any events. They are dated in March, 2019. So back into the old blog I go, and sho nuff, on Day 100 I picked up a Zio monitor and stuck it on. I have zero recollection of that. But reading that post, it sounds like that’s when I last went through a period of nervous-feeling noisy heartbeats, like now. So I may be an uber-nerd, but I am also a forgetful old codger.
I practiced RATCT and then spent a while trying to work out the chords for “Grateful”, and got some of them figured out.
Codgerville 