On Monday I went to the Heart Hospital for my nuclear stress test. If you’ve never had one of them, well, its an interesting experience. It started out, after a wait, with an injection of technitium. The only weird side effect was an odd smell that lasted 15-20 seconds. Then another 45 minute wait, followed by a trip into the Siemens e.cam gizmo. Its basically a huge slowly rotating x-ray machine except that instead of pounding me with radiation, it picks up the radiation I’d been injected in instead. I guess that’s a good thing.

Another waiting period, and then I was led into the stress chamber. No, not a dank hole filled with rats and needles, it was a large, well-lit room with a treadmill. And needles, yeah, but they weren’t too bad. My chest was shaved into a weird pattern, wires and sensors were attached, and I ended up chatting with a friendly nurse about the Bruce protocol, which I’d just started in on.

I started out walking at 1.7 mph up a 10% slope. After three minutes we went to 2.5 mph up a 12%. Then 3.4 at 14% and finally 4.2 at 16%, increasing every 3 minutes. At that point my heartrate was up to 168 bpm, about 85% of my estimated MHR. At this point I guess a lot of people would have been working pretty hard - I would have been a couple of weeks ago when I was hurting - but it was a little odd. My heart rate was up, but on the whole I wasn’t really working very hard. A couple of the nurses had commented on it in fact: everything except the HR looked as if I was just out for a stroll.

Still, I’d hit the 85% target, so I got another injection of technitium and pressed up against a camera, while still on the camera. Since I wasn’t working hard though, the attending nurse kept things going and took me to level five, which is 5.2 mph at an 18% grade. After a minute, I actually started breathing moderately and starting to feel a sweat; my heart was spinning up though, and actually got into the low 190s.

So. According to the cardiologist who read the results, my heart is working very well. There’s definitely something going on, since my HR is elevating much faster than the rest of my body is tiring out, but I don’t have a heart problem. My primary care physician was saying that it could easily be the case that its just stressed from my infection, and this will take care of itself given enough time. Still, I’m getting a consult with another specialist on Monday, and we’ll definitely be talking about this.

I’m going a little stir-crazy from “taking it easy,” and not running for so long. Still, talking with Gilbert today was good, and I’m looking forward to kicking this thing and getting the doctor’s okay to get back to training. It could be a week or two, or it could be next year, but its going to happen and I’m already having distance running dreams.

In lighter news, congratulations to Erine for his solid 12 minute PR today in New York! Its not a traditionally difficult course, but it can be surprisingly hard as I found out last year. Very, very cool.

Oh, and one more thing - Thon, Mike, Liliana, Gilbert and Bernard ran The Half up in Dallas this weekend; two of them finished in the top ten and one came in 2nd in their age group! Who did what? Check out Mike’s blog for all the details.

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