not leaving well enough alone..

Little to report on the heart front, happily. Health seems to be good. Cut down on the hay fever and allergies with the spraying of the box elder bugs. Now the windows are a mess. But, oh well, an easy trade off. Workouts continue apace. We are looking forward to proceeding south in a month or so.

But wait, there's more. Doing the cataract thing. One eye this Thursday and  the second in two weeks. The shades over my eyes have grown progressively worse, as happens to most of us of a certain (advanced) age. The procedure now takes 20 min. They make a 2 mm incision into the sac that holds the lens. Then they blast that with ultra sound and suck it out. I do not remember how they get the new lens in because it would also initially have to be 2 mm small. I am sure that intake and post-op recovery will add an hour on each end, but the efficiency is really remarkable. And there is money to be made. It was interesting to me how long it was to get an appointment for the annual check up; but when I mentioned surgery, the doors were flung open and I was welcomed in almost immediately. My long time opthamologist will do the procedure. When he examined me last week, he had done 9 before coming into the office. Can you say moolah? He tells me he has been doing them for many years, virtually error free. Gambler's fallacy, anyone? Both lenses will be for long vision as I understand it, with prescription glasses for reading.

To be continued....

good news and threes..

Is it good news that comes in threes? Well, depending on how one counts, I am closing in. Today the shock doc, the ablator, took me off all heart medication! No more amiodarone; no more Eliquis. (The latter was $42 each prescription.) The former was toxic as discussed previously. (The third area of toxicity appears to be liver.) Tapering off? No. Amiodarone has a half-life of a couple weeks and so peters out on its own. The doc also thought there was no need for the apaxiban (Eliquis); instead, back to a baby aspirin each morning. The apaxiban is gone in a couple days. This is all wonderful news.

Now it is back to careful monitoring of all systems, but particularly speeding heart. They expect my resting HR to climb some in the absence of the amiodarone. Exercise seems to be bringing that down. I now have multiple readings in the high 60s at the time of arising.

And the former hypertension is gone. As has happened to a good friend, this is probably due to weight loss and as a corrollary (sp?) improved heart function. So exercise and maintaining a good weight will be critical.

But one must be cautious. It has been too easy these past few days to be a little less careful with the sodium thing.

nice news

It is official: I no longer have heart failure! So says the PA who examined me an hour ago. I don't see them again until next May. If anything changes I am to call. She said they can do quite a bit over the phone. She also said that Mayo in AZ has a top rated heart failure team now--it wasn't so a couple years ago--and Mayo  is only 10 min from our winter digs.

Tomorrow the rhythm kings--the shock docs, the ablators. They are important because only they can take me the toxic rhythm drug I am on (Amiodarone). It is toxic to eyes, lungs and a third area which I have forgotten. She thinks they may fade out the dosage. We'll see. I have only been on it for 3 months, well within the range of acceptability. When I go off that I will have to be cognizant of speeding heart.

More news tomorrow....

allergy season

It's allergy season for me. The eyes itch and the  nose  runs. Sneeze rate increases. So far it hasn't been bad enough that I have begun to ingest any OTC meds. But I am using eye drops (Zaditrol) which the Walgreen's guy said just came off the prescription list last year. It does a pretty good job of reducing eye itch.

For me the big thing it to not let the post-nasal drip develop into upper respiratory distress, bronchitis and the  rest.

A contributing factor is the infestation of box elder bugs we go through this  time of year. They really are benign as most bugs go. They are just pesty. Watching TV in the evening they gravitate to light sources which may mean they are flying about your head. They love our south facing windows and walls. This time  of year those surfaces radiate a lot of heat. The exterminator is scheduled in a couple weeks--they were a month out when I booked them--and when they were here a couple of years back their spraying  did a great job. In fact when the bugs get onto our tiles where they were sprayed two years ago they soon die. This suggests to me that the pesticide remains active (and us breathing it). But the outside mainly is  what contributes to the inside problems. They need to respray down to the foundations and on the windows. (There goes the  window washing job of a few weeks ago!). Ah, the joys of being a home owner. All of the foregoing is to point to the fact that when I kill them, or vacuum up their carcasses I end up short of breath and sneezy. They are clearly a contributor to the allergy blues.l

Everything else is trucking along just fine. The workouts proceed apace. I can now open some jars with difficult lids that I haven't been able to for a long time. My time in the aerobic part of my workout is steadily increasing as is the  exertion level on the bike and the amount of weight I am hoisting. Still not where I want it but improving each week. I miss salt and the foods that contain it, eg, cheese. But I can have some usually verboten foods if I plan my day wisely. For example I can keep sodium virtually out of a 500-600 calorie breakfast easily. That gives some room to carefully measure out an amount of cheese and crackers that won't put me over top which  is 2000 mg in a day. All in all not bad.

Hopefully the good news continues....