Originally Posted by
GhostRider62
My calcium score is zero and I do not have A-Fib.
My heart stops in the middle of the night many times for 3-8 seconds. (24/7 monitoring for a month on three separate occasions)
I feel quite certain my death will be a not so sudden cardiac arrest while sleeping. I have seen two pulmonologists and four cardiologists.
I have read all the studies. They have no clue nor is there any remote possibility of a clinical study. MI patients on the other hand are big money makers.
I accept it but what I do not accept is the arrogance of the Medical Community. For instance, I have felt my heart stop and told Docs. "No, you cannot feel your heart beat." Me: I can hear it and feel it. "No, that is impossible" When I have felt it stop, I put my little pointer finger onto the that little spot on the wrist and there was nothing. Nothing. I love the word, "idiopathic". It is Latin for, "We have no ******g idea, have a nice life"
In the end, each of us has to make a decision and it comes down to quality of life.
That's hilarious. When I'm in decent shape, that little sucker shakes my chest, blam, blam, blam..When I do deep breathing stuff, I do it by counting beats, so many in, so many out. Don't need to feel my pulse in my wrist.
I also love that word. I also had the heart stopping thing and also wore a Halter. The cardio said don't worry about it, it's nothing. My take is that probably it doesn't like to beat even more slowly, so it just misses a few beats. Don't want to get over-oxygenated, do we?
Yes, it's a quality of life thing. I don't think the number of years is as important as the quality of those years. I'm aiming for a very sharp drop-off. So far I can do anything I want to do, it's just that what I want to do has come down a bit. We no longer do 70-100 mile 10-day backpacks. Now it's only 40-50 miles. I don't ride 400k anymore, now it's just 250k. I started riding mostly tandem, partly because it's harder and partly because I didn't want to race the youngers anymore. I'm comfortable with all that. I know that eventually, like zonatandem, the bikes will be parked, given away, but we'll put that off as long as we can. How we put that off is to eat right and train at least 5 days/week year 'round. We'll know we've done everything we can and had a fabulous life. I don't fear it.
Noticing the additions since I started this post, I once did a 10-day backpack with a torn meniscus. My doctor didn't believe that was possible until I got up on his desk and made him order an MRI. Surgery fixed it. I just kinda drug the leg along behind me. I wasn't going to tap out on that backpack! Had a great time, really.