I haven't written about my heart much recently. When I saw Dr Stobie in April I was more or less given permission to keep doing some exercise wise as the heart seemed to be behaving. And while Dr Stobie doesn't consider the heart to be "better", things do seem greatly improved.
That improvement means that my heart rhythms are fairly normal these days. I very rarely seen arrhythmia in my monitoring. When I exercise I feel pretty normal, don't have any attacks of spiking heart rate or feeling faint. All good really.
It is hard to put a finger on the single source of why things have improved, but there are likely to be numerous contributing factors. The ablation I had back in February last year certainly helped. My heart didn't settle into sinus rhythm straight afterwards, but the number of ectopic beats I was getting decreased significantly. Good thing. Reducing exercise has almost certainly helped heaps too. I went through a 4 month period of detraining at the end of last year which studies agree helps the majority of people (but not all). Since I went through the detraining I have started exercising again a fair bit, but nowhere near the levels that I used too. Pretty sure the reduced training load is contributing to my sustained heart health. Other factors that I think have helped are small life style changes, such as less caffeine, no caffeine before exercise, that sort of thing. I know most sports nutritionists point to coffee before training as a good booster, but I now know that it is a no no for me. Since cutting caffeine out of my pre-training routine I have seen no heart problems during training. Circumstantial evidence I know, but happy to go along with it.
That all brings me to today. On Wednesday I got a call from my friendly neighbourhood medical imager to ask me when I wanted to come in for my cardiac MRI. If I am honest I had forgotten that I was supposed to get an MRI, so fair to say the call was a bit of a surprise. It all come flooding back to me though, last time I saw Dr Stobie he had suggested a 6 month MRI, so that is what I had today. The purpose of the MRI today isn't for any particular issue, but rather to check that structurally the heart is still as it should be and to check on the size to see whether it has shrunk at all.
Today's was my third cardiac MRI and all up it went very smoothly. They are not the most fun experiences as they involve a lot of breath holding so they can get clear images of your heart. So besides all the usual MRI fun of loud noises and confined spaces you have a voice in your ear telling you to breathe out and hold your breath every few inhalations.
It always amazes me with MRIs though how easy I find it to drift off. Every time I go into one I think "wow this is louder than I remember, no way I will fall asleep this time" and then sure enough after about 20 minutes I am struggling to keep my eyes open. Normally I wouldn't fight so hard to stay awake, I enjoy a nap as much as the next person, but with these MRIs there is all that breath holding I mentioned earlier, so you have to stay with it. Pretty sure I didn't drift off at all this time, but I still had a few moments where I lay there unsure if I had missed a breath hold or not. The technician didn't mention anything so pretty sure I was all good.
You don't get any results straight after the MRI as the images have to go to the Doctor for interpretation, but all indications are that it went okay. Certainly better than my first MRI where my heart was jumping around so much that it made it very difficult to take images of. That time I was in the tube for ages and the images were still pretty poor quality. This time I was in there for at least 30 minutes, but the pictures apparently came up nice and clear, so that was good.
Time will tell exactly what the MRI shows, but I suspect it won't reveal all that much. Really it should only be showing stuff if there is anything wrong and my gut feel at the moment is that the heart is ticking along quite nicely.
Here's hoping anyway.
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