Thought I was doing too well….
Yesterday morning, I woke up with an all-too-familiar tachycardia attack – heart thumping away at a regular 170-180 bpm. Not at all unusual, unfortunately, and nothing to be done about it except stay lying down and wait for it to end; these things had never lasted longer than about three hours before….
That was around 5am. By 12.30, with my organic pump still thundering away, I was starting to wonder if it was time to panic. By that time, I’d managed to get downstairs to the sofa, but being upright and walking around made me dizzy and faint. Even lying down, I was feeling space-out; the ultra-fast circulation meant my brain was running a little short of oxygen.
So I rang the surgery, and asked the receptionist to ask Doc G if he could pop over sometime that day. He arrived two hours later. Just twenty minutes after the attack ended by itself, natch.
But Doc G is good. He gave me a good checking over, reassured me that I hadn’t had a heart attack and that everything looked and sounded fine.
And then he cheered me up with “So long as your heart is sound and your arteries are clear, these attacks are good exercise for your heart – hard running doubles your heart rate. And yours has probably done the equivalent of two marathons today!”
What a great thought – not moving off the sofa and getting all the exercise I need just by having one or two of these attacks each month!
But it appears that whatever I’m going to die of, it won’t be a heart attack.