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Health Updates
Sep. 1st, 2005 05:13 pmSkip this if it bores you:
1. KNEE
I saw the orthopaedic guy on Tuesday and began physiotherapy this morning. The miniscus (the spongy cartilege between my tibia and my femur) is torn. The clicking I've heard in the last monts as the tibia picking up a ragged corner and then it snapping back down again. I will be having an MRI in the next month to determine exactly what's what. Depending on what the doctor sees, surgery to trim the miniscus is a possibility.
The physiotherapist has two goals: first, he must help me get my leg to straighten completely which it has yet to do a month after the accident. Second, he is helping me with the ongoing arthritis in both knees. This will largely be accomplished by stretches to loosen the IT bands on the outside of my thighs and exercises to strengthen my VMO muscles on the inside. Hopefully, this combination will result in my kneecaps moving inwards by a millimetre and thus getting out of the damaged track they have been digging for last couple of decades.
I will bike again. Perhaps tomorrow!
2. HEART
My last ECG confirmed that I suffer from occassional paroxysmal atrial fibrillation. The scary thing was that starting in May, I was having bouts of PAF lasting between five and 30 hours every other day, some of these bouts being more incapacitating than others. I had experenced a three month period of hell like that in 2002, but after three months, I went back to normal. Well, sometime halfway through our camping trip, as my knee click became more pronounced, my heart started behaving again. Now I'm down to one bout of PAF a week.
If I do start getting more frequent PAFs again, I will go on a beta blocker that will both stop some arhythmias and will keep my heart from beating too fast which is the real danger. The PAF captured on the ECG showed a heart-rate of 150. Having your heart at 150 for eight hours can damage it.
My current thinking is that the three months of madness was a stress symptom and now I'm calming down. It is interesting to note a new surgical alternative called "ablation" wherein they zap the area of the heart that they think is sending out the errant signals that interfere with the normal pacemaker. That sounds all very sci-fi and compelling.
However, if I can avoid both surgeries, I will.
1. KNEE
I saw the orthopaedic guy on Tuesday and began physiotherapy this morning. The miniscus (the spongy cartilege between my tibia and my femur) is torn. The clicking I've heard in the last monts as the tibia picking up a ragged corner and then it snapping back down again. I will be having an MRI in the next month to determine exactly what's what. Depending on what the doctor sees, surgery to trim the miniscus is a possibility.
The physiotherapist has two goals: first, he must help me get my leg to straighten completely which it has yet to do a month after the accident. Second, he is helping me with the ongoing arthritis in both knees. This will largely be accomplished by stretches to loosen the IT bands on the outside of my thighs and exercises to strengthen my VMO muscles on the inside. Hopefully, this combination will result in my kneecaps moving inwards by a millimetre and thus getting out of the damaged track they have been digging for last couple of decades.
I will bike again. Perhaps tomorrow!
2. HEART
My last ECG confirmed that I suffer from occassional paroxysmal atrial fibrillation. The scary thing was that starting in May, I was having bouts of PAF lasting between five and 30 hours every other day, some of these bouts being more incapacitating than others. I had experenced a three month period of hell like that in 2002, but after three months, I went back to normal. Well, sometime halfway through our camping trip, as my knee click became more pronounced, my heart started behaving again. Now I'm down to one bout of PAF a week.
If I do start getting more frequent PAFs again, I will go on a beta blocker that will both stop some arhythmias and will keep my heart from beating too fast which is the real danger. The PAF captured on the ECG showed a heart-rate of 150. Having your heart at 150 for eight hours can damage it.
My current thinking is that the three months of madness was a stress symptom and now I'm calming down. It is interesting to note a new surgical alternative called "ablation" wherein they zap the area of the heart that they think is sending out the errant signals that interfere with the normal pacemaker. That sounds all very sci-fi and compelling.
However, if I can avoid both surgeries, I will.
