I slept forever today, it was great. I was given my meds and marching orders back to my room to see the Doctor. There were a lot more today, probably as it wasn’t a public holiday and they told me they were going to have me do a stress test and also a Echocardiography which is an ultrasound of the heart. This way they could see if the medicine was working.
I had numerous visitors come in and see me before the tests and then my nurse Claire got me ready to go for the stress test. They put me on an exercise bike and got me to get hy heart rate up. I was on a ECG machine and when it hit it’s highest they injected me with Thallium.
Thallium is taken up by the muscle cells and is recorded by a special scanning devise. Areas of the heart not receiving sufficient oxygen show up as ‘cold spots’ due to the limited uptake of thallium by the heart muscle cells.
I went from that test immediately to my Echo, which is a test that provides images of the moving heart, valves and blood flow inside the heart by ultrasound. The guy who was doing this test was called Mark and he was amazing, showing me what all the pictures meant and taking lots of time to show me how valves open and close etc, totally amazing what these people do, he said that reading the ultrasound was about as normal to him as looking outside a window.
Again, I went from this test back to the room where I had the stress test, where this time I was just injected with the Thallium and scanned, without any excercise. Apparently these tests pretty much induce a heart attack. A patient who came in later in my room was telling me all about his heart history, he seemed like he had been through a lot and was dreading the tests, but I found them easy.
I had more visitors, spent a bit of time by myself, asked my nurse Lucie lots of quiestions and then before I went to bed I got to talk to one of the Doctor’s I met on the first day called Roxanna who said she had been thinking about me all Christmas and was just so shocked seeing such a young woman. She answered lots of questions for me and gave me advice on what I should do if anything else happened in the future. It really made me feel much better.
Recent Comments