Tag Archives: heart

Go ahead, make my day

Diabetes Leave a comment

As I am off in Bali.. Yay!! No phone or internet!!  (Can’t wait to tell you all about it)….. and fingerpricker.com has just reached it’s 1st Birthday! I have re-posted one of my very first posts in case you missed it….

Her face glowed with a indescribable aura! It absolutely radiated! Her cheeks flushed and her eyes sparkled like the sun off the ocean on a sunny clear day. I caught her eye and for a moment and I had a feeling of deja-vu. Or had I met this person before? I caught her eye again and I peered in closer.

I smiled at this person in the mirror and welcomed her back….

It has been exactly three months since I have last done any exercise. I am by no means an athlete or even just a very fit person. I used to be reasonably fit before Diabetes knocked on my door but now I found it the one thing that made balancing my blood sugar the hardest. But the last three months has been different. I was waiting around to have my EPS ablation (where they burnt that SVT out of my heart so that my heart didn’t go into overdrive) and it just got into my head. In a massive way!

With balancing my thoughts between monitoring my heart rate and monitoring my blood sugar my inner dialogue during exercise roared FEAR and SELF DOUBT so much at me that I couldn’t hear the self motivating thoughts I was trying to focus on. You know those thoughts when you ar trying to push yourself through that last 10 mins or the mountain climb in spin class? Mine range from single power words like; Stronger. Faster. Leaner. to the humourous; I think I can I think I can!  to the more profound; There are no shortcuts to any place worth going. But they have been a mere whisper of late. Until now!

I pulled out my mountain bike a few days ago and armed with my heart rate monitor and enough juice to feed a classroom of kindergartens at recess I set off on a little 4klm ride. Wow! How I have missed this feeling! The next day I did an 8.5 klm ride along the beach in the glorious spring sun and tears quite literally made my eyes glisten. The way exercise makes me feel is fabulous! The way it makes me feel so alive! The way it makes me feel like I have diabetes by the scruff of its neck against the wall laughing in its face, ” Go ahead, make my day”….

Go ahead, make my day

Diabetes Leave a comment

Her face glowed with a indescribable aura! It absolutely radiated! Her cheeks flushed and her eyes sparkled like the sun off the ocean on a sunny clear day. I caught her eye and for a moment and I had a feeling of deja-vu. Or had I met this person before? I caught her eye again and I peered in closer.

I smiled at this person in the mirror and welcomed her back….

It has been exactly three months since I have last done any exercise. I am by no means an athlete or even just a very fit person. I used to be reasonably fit before Diabetes knocked on my door but now I found it the one thing that made balancing my blood sugar the hardest. But the last three months has been different. I was waiting around to have my EPS ablation (where they burnt that SVT out of my heart so that my heart didn’t go into overdrive) and it just got into my head. In a massive way!

With balancing my thoughts between monitoring my heart rate and monitoring my blood sugar my inner dialogue during exercise roared FEAR and SELF DOUBT so much at me that I couldn’t hear the self motivating thoughts I was trying to focus on. You know those thoughts when you ar trying to push yourself through that last 10 mins or the mountain climb in spin class? Mine range from single power words like; Stronger. Faster. Leaner. to the humourous; I think I can I think I can!  to the more profound; There are no shortcuts to any place worth going. But they have been a mere whisper of late. Until now!

I pulled out my mountain bike a few days ago and armed with my heart rate monitor and enough juice to feed a classroom of kindergartens at recess I set off on a little 4klm ride. Wow! How I have missed this feeling! The next day I did an 8.5 klm ride along the beach in the glorious spring sun and tears quite literally made my eyes glisten. The way exercise makes me feel is fabulous! The way it makes me feel so alive! The way it makes me feel like I have diabetes by the scruff of its neck against the wall laughing in its face, ” Go ahead, make my day”….

Be still my beating heart

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A few months ago I was at boot camp and thought that I was going low.. My heart rate started beating a little higher than normal.. and then continued to rise. I was wearing a heart rate monitor at the time and it was bouncing between 230 and 250 bpm. Wow… My maximum heart rate for exercise is 184bpm..(220 minus your age).

I have had little episodes like this in the past and have always been able to control them by deep breathing and within a few minutes they normally calm down and apart from maybe a little muscle soreness all would be back to normal.

Not this time…..

I broke out in a furious cold sweat and started thinking that I was having a heart attack. I don’t want to tell you that I drove the 5 minutes home, breathing in alarming little gasps with chest pain so severe that I thought my ribs would crack but that would be lying. I just wanted to get home… My husband would know what to do.

I collapsed through the door begging for my husband to rip my clothes off as my bra felt like it was choking the last little breath out of me… :) at first I’m sure he thought it was an invitation! and I lay where I fell, breathing in gasps, in pain watching my heart rate monitor bounce around 250bpm.

Hospital was where my husband wanted to take me but I didn’t want to move an inch because of the pain… so for 40 minutes I was a trapped until I almost couldn’t take it any longer and with a thump like I had been kicked in the chest my heart rate fell to 120 and then a minute later with a smaller thump down to 89… which is about my usual resting heart rate.

I have never experienced something as horrifying as this before so I made an appointment with a cardiologist as soon as I could and he diagnosed me with a SVT… No! that is not a sexually transmitted disease :)

It means: Supraventricular tachycardia (SVT) causes episodes of a fast heartbeat. Palpitations and other symptoms may occur during each episode. Regular medication can prevent episodes of SVT. Another treatment option in some cases is to destroy a tiny part of the heart that triggers the SVT.

I wasn’t keen on consuming more medication so he suggested an EPS and Ablation which sounded scary as all hell…   A catheter (small wire) is passed via a large vein in the top of your leg into the chambers of your heart. It is guided by special X-ray techniques. The tip of the catheter can destroy a tiny section of heart tissue that is the source or trigger of the abnormal electrical impulses. This is only suitable if the exact site of the trigger can be found by special tests, and be located accurately by the catheter tip. It can be very successful, and after the procedure you will not need to take medication to prevent SVT.

Basically they burn a section of your heart so that it doesn’t kick into that double beat.. What the! Burn…. with a laser!!… in my heart…

Did my diabetes do this to me? No… I have had this my whole life but never to this degree.. but for some reason over the last year it has been getting worse.