Perfection

I’m going to jump right from sorrow to babies.

After a year of heart medication my ejection fraction went from 27 to normal, and I was less tired and less breathless.

Dr. Heart took me off the pills to see if my heart would pump well without assistance. I had to wait for six months before getting another MUGA scan to measure my heart function. Near the end of it I was getting insanely impatient.

The glaring green hands on my biological clock were killing me, but I had to wait for the green light.

Nurse Heart makes fun of me now for being so impatient. I thought Dr. Heart was slow-playing me, so I called to bump my test up a month. My plea worked.

All the anxiety in the world didn’t change the results of my test. (There goes the straightforward mind-body connection theory.) My heart passed and we threw the condoms in the garbage. I wish I had cut them up into little pieces and then burned them in a cathartic bonfire, or at least mailed them to a country with limited access to birth control; it would have made a great story.

We were lucky: we got right to it and got pregnant within three months of trying. I felt amazing. The shift from cautious to all-out-cardio quickly killed my breakable -complex.

And then I was back to fragile with a teeny tiny embryo in my belly. I was happy and comfortable; I couldn’t ask for anything more. My life was perfect. I didn’t feel completely healthy when I stopped taking the heart medication, but as soon as that embryo burrowed into my uterus lining, I started feeling better and better.

But it was a long journey. I was still classified as sick, because I was diagnosed with Fibro, and I still sometimes think this is the story of somebody with life-long health issues.

It got worse – scary worse – before I woke up in the hospital as a new person. I’ll tell you all about the bad stuff soon.

Premature Ventricular Contractions

It’s common for a healthy woman in her twenties to experience some PVCs – extra, abnormal heartbeats that begin in one of the ventricles. That’s what my doctor said when I was rejected by the blood bank for having an abnormal pulse. She wasn’t making it up; it’s true.

It’s not healthy to have more than one hundred PVCs a minute.

My family doctor was smiling when she told me what the sleep study found. Don’t judge her for giving me bad news in a light-hearted way; in this case, bad news meant good news. Knowing that my heart was working so hard to pump blood through my body, she had no doubt in her mind that I was tired because of the PVCs. My other symptoms (pain in shoulders and neck, headaches, blurred vision, etc) could also be related to my heart issue.

Woo hoo, there was finally an explanation! Unfortunately, we also had to consider why my heart wasn’t pumping well. PVCs are a symptom, not a disease, and the cause ranges from easily fixed (viral infection) to deadly (Hypoplastic left heart syndrome).

Dare I say, the news gave me pause.

The tests started right away. Remember that bulky piece of equipment I had to wear? It was a Holter monitor, a device that recorded my heart beat for 48 hours. It confirmed the PVCs that I had the night of the sleep study weren’t a fluke. My heart had thousands of extra beats over the course of two days.

Then Dr. Heart (my favourite specialist so far) put me on a treadmill and found out that my heart didn’t freak out under stress. He thought that was great news, but needed to do one more test just to check something out, as doctors often say.

I’ll never forget my first echocardiogram (basically an ultrasound of the heart). Many people cry when they see a growing fetus on an ultrasound screen. I had to choke back tears when I saw the image of my heart working so hard to keep me alive. It was obvious, even to me, that my heart was sick.

I described it to my family by doing a dance. I stood tall, stretched my arms high above my head and pumped my legs up and down as fast as I could. That was my tired heart. Except my heart couldn’t fall over when it was too tired to keep going. Well, I guess it could, but I’d be dead.

There was one more test before I got the news. An ECHO is requested by doctors to look at the structure of the heart, and it can also measure an ejection fraction (how much blood pumps out of the left ventricle with each heart beat). A MUGA scan is a more accurate way to measure the ejection fraction (EF).

A normal EF is 55 to 70 per cent. Mine was 27 per cent.