Update, saw the cardiologist last week and she ordered an echocardiogram, a stress test, and two CT scans (I assume they’re CT scans) of my abdominal aorta and the one that’s dilated.
Echocardiogram is tomorrow. I remembered I had an echocardiogram a few years ago and looked at my chart and it was 2017. That’s about 4 years ago before I started eating right and exercising to lose weight.
The reason my primary care doctor sent me to a cardiologist back then was because I was having some chest tightness. I self-diagnosed that myself. I got to looking around on the internet to see what could cause it besides heart issues and it turns out acid reflux can do it. Sometimes it would get so bad I couldn’t lay down.
Anyhow after reading a couple of articles I raised the head of my bed and stopped using spearmint tobacco pouches. I was using them to avoid smoking. That night I took a maximum dose of Pepto bismol about a half hour before bed and everything was fine. The chest tightness was gone for good lol. So I postponed the stress test that was also ordered.
My primary care doctor kept bugging me about the stress test so I went ahead and did it but it was during covid. They wouldn’t let me do the treadmill did the chemically induced method. I’ll never do that again. Anyhow it came back okay per the results.
One thing I noticed reviewing that 2017 echocardiogram test result was that they mentioned “mild dilation of ascending aorta at 3.9 cm”. So I’m feeling a lot better about it now. If it only increased in size by .3 cm since 2017 I’ll take it.
Stress test and the rest of it are the second week of February. I looked into stress tests and it appears for my age around 2.8 mph will be the speed of the treadmill to get my heart rate up to around 135. I’m already used to going on the treadmill at 3 to 3.2 mph for up to 45 minutes with no discomfort whatsoever. Just got home from 40 minutes on the treadmill. So I’ll figure the stress test will be a breeze as far as the treadmill part.
My blood pressure is fine with my PCP reducing my amlodipine from 10 mg per day to 5 mg. It was getting too low and I think it was because of the nattokinase combined with the amlodipine.
Cardiologist skilled scheduled me for a July appointment. She said that’ll be fine unless the tests indicate I should see her sooner.
Anyhow feeling a lot less concerned about it at this point.
One thing I’m not supposed to do is shovel snow anymore. So I just paid a couple of neighborhood teens to take care of it. Sidewalks and my driveway. I spread a bunch of gravel and made a gravel driveway in the front yard up by my porch.
Did that because of kids breaking into cars when they’re parked on the street in this neighborhood. As well as stealing them. I don’t leave anything in my vehicles and leave them unlocked so they don’t bust the windows up for nothing lol. I have clubs on the steering wheels.
As far as keto, I’m still showing ketones on my urine strips most everyday. No need to check blood ketones if they’re showing up on the urine strips. My weight has leveled out. Up a bit and down a bit day to day. I’m going to stop fasting until after the stress test. Seems to be conflicting studies on whether or not fasting is good for cardiovascular issues. I don’t think my fasting has done any harm. No symptoms and I feel pretty good.
One other thing, I read a couple of articles about how to prep before an echocardiogram. The search results also showed a couple of articles on what not to do after an echocardiogram.
A couple of things was don’t eat a big meal and don’t do any moderate to heavy cardio. The article said it could skew the results of the echocardiogram. Scratching my head on that. How could what I do when I get home after the echocardiogram affect the results of the echocardiogram ?
I’ll ask them what’s up with that tomorrow.
