{"id":224,"date":"2004-04-22T14:10:33","date_gmt":"2004-04-22T21:10:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/balafon.net\/?p=224"},"modified":"2004-04-22T14:10:33","modified_gmt":"2004-04-22T21:10:33","slug":"cry-wolf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/?p=224","title":{"rendered":"Cry Wolf"},"content":{"rendered":"

For some reason I’ve been reading a lot of medical and EMS blogs lately. Found an interesting post<\/a> at CodeBlog<\/a> about not ignoring the warning signs of cardiovascular problems.<\/p>\n

It’s good advice, I’m sure, but it makes me frustrated. Several years ago I had a couple extended episodes of atrial fibrillation<\/a>, both about 24 hours. At that time I was in the best physical shape of my life — I worked out regularly and my resting pulse was below 60. I did every test in the book: EKG’s, 24-hour portable heart monitors, ultrasounds, x-rays, treadmills, blood tests out the wazoo, but everything was negative. There was no reason anyone could find for my heart suddenly going pitter-pat.<\/p>\n

Ever since then — I was in my mid-twenties then; I’m 29 now — I have quite often experienced heart palpitations, chest pain, shortness of breath, lack of energy. (Just this morning I was awakened by several seconds of very strong, fast palpitations. Then had chest pain for about an hour afterwards.) I mention this to my doctor occasionally, who obligingly orders up another round of tests, but they always come back completely negative. I’ve the 24-hour monitor test several times now, and each time my heart has beat like a metronome the whole time. So we’ve generally chalked up these symptoms as related to stress and anxiety. Just to reassure the three people who read this blog: it’s not really a big deal in terms of my everyday life: I’m not in as good as shape as I used to be, and have less energy, but that’s probably just old age creeping on :-)<\/p>\n

The worrying thing is that I probably wouldn’t know a heart attack if it came up and bit me in the ass. I’d just assume it was more of the same. So I’ve got this nagging fear that someday my chest will be hurting, my heart will go flip-flop and skip a beat, as it does quite often, and then not start again<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For some reason I’ve been reading a lot of medical and EMS blogs lately. Found an interesting post at CodeBlog about not ignoring the warning signs of cardiovascular problems. It’s good advice, I’m sure, but it makes me frustrated. Several years ago I had a couple extended episodes of atrial fibrillation, both about 24 hours. … Continue reading “Cry Wolf”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=224"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}