Heart Stuff

Sooooo, I was really cooking along on the couch to 5k. Like, doing great. I was just starting on my second iteration of week 4, I was running outside three times a week, I was getting it done. I was even able to run for the entire time each interval! And, I was starting to feel super ready and excited for three races that I'm running in the next few months.

Then I had a couple of weird things that I started noticing again that have always kind of been these problems when I run: my heart beats fast. Like, up over 190 beats a minute and sometimes dry-heaving kind of fast. My face gets SUPER red, almost purple. Also, my heart rate will stay over 100 for the rest of the day after I run, and I don't quite feel fully recovered from it until the next day. If you think that this isn't alarming, let me put it into context for you by telling you that I had just started to consistently hit the 2-mile mark in my running when these shenanigans started happening full force.

This has always happened, but it has gotten markedly worse over the years. So, while I was on vacation last week, I took advantage of some of my time off and went to the doctor. Then I proceeded to get a bunch of tests - an EKG, a chest x-ray, an echocardiogram, and a stress test.

There are a few things about all of this stuff that I have noticed:

1. In the waiting rooms of cardiac wards in medical centers, I was the youngest person by two or three decades.

2. Electrodes leave marks on me for days. Like, my echo happened on Wednesday and I still have marks.

3. WATCHING YOUR HEART BEAT ON A SONOGRAM IS THE COOLEST THING EVER.

I'm not sure what's going to come out of all of this testing. Aside from the echo, which I don't know the results of yet, all the rest of it has come back normal. So, maybe I'm just perpetually out of shape. To learn that after all of this would suck a lot, but at least I'd know.