So… my triumphant arrival to the lowest rung of the fitness ladder was in fact short-lived. A scant two weeks into my debut as a monitor-wearing stationary recumbent biker, I was … what’s the word? “Kicked out” is too strong. “Asked to leave” is not quite accurate. Maybe “sent home until further notice” would be the best way to put it.
This must’ve been around September 25, Elias’s 6th birthday. [Insert gratuitous incredibly cute 6-year-old photo here.]
I keep thinking the kid must've peaked, but amazingly he just gets cuter. I mean, read his text! See his missing tooth!
It was a very fun weekend, with the shared birthday party of Grandpa Max and Elias, turning 65 and 6 respectively, and Mom and Max visiting to celebrate. I made another owl cake, per request, and also a pretty good carrot sheet cake for Max, with all 65 candles actually on it. (I’m having technical difficulties, but will post some photos soon.)
We had a great weekend! …And maybe I overdid it a bit. That Sunday night, while very, very tired, I fell in the shower. Now, Ben will tell you I simply slipped like a normal person trying to reach dental floss that was basically out of reach. Maybe so. But in trying to figure out how I ended up with my head by the faucet and a scrape on my arm and an impressive bruise on my calf, I’m sort of at a loss. Was there a one-second gap in my consciousness? Or did I just slip and fall in a heap? I can’t really say.
The next morning, I woke up feeling more or less like death warmed over, but I am NOT a QUITTER!! So I put on my fitness togs, got the kids dressed and fed and to school, and dragged my battered carcass up to Cleveland. Against all odds, I was on time, in my heart monitor, ready to have my BP taken at 10:30, exactly as I was supposed to be. The exercise physiologist asked how I was doing, and I told her I was not doing great and … confessed that I had fallen the night before. This stopped her in her tracks. She asked for details. Her face grew more and more serious. Then she said, “I’m sorry but you can’t exercise today. You have to get in touch with your cardiologist and get his approval before you can come back.” I said, “Okay, well I’ll see you Wednesday then.” I could see she thought this was highly unlikely…
I felt both relieved and disappointed as I headed home that morning. I only wanted to crawl into bed and now I could do so! They won’t let me exercise so now I don’t have to! Hurrah! And on the other hand I was thinking, “I just got kicked off the bottom rung of the fitness ladder and now my goals are slipping farther and farther away…” a depressing thought. I called the cardiologist that day and left a message with his secretary.
A few days went by. I rested up, sort of happy that I was off the hook for the time being. I called again. A few more days went by. Then a week. I called again. Finally I called for the third time, a full ten days later and really insisted that someone needs to #)($*)( call me back! For realz! An hour or so later, the nurse called me back with a snippy, “The doctor has approved you to return to cardiac rehab.” Oh! Okay. So I got out my incredibly full calendar and tried to figure out how I would get back in the saddle the following week.
Then, a short time after that, the Big Man himself called me!! THE head cardiologist of the Syncope Clinic. In person. He said, in effect, “Wait, what?” I explained what had happened as clearly and candidly as I could. I fell. I was reaching for something and probably just slipped. “Did you have to go to the hospital? Did your family call 911?” he asked. “No, no… it was nothing like that. My husband helped me up and I was okay.”
(All the while Ben has insisted that this is MUCH ado about nothing. People fall in showers all the time!)
The doctor rummaged through my files a bit and realized that my Stress Test Hell should’ve been followed up upon in the first place– your BP is not supposed to plummet like that, I guess. I had just thought it was a bone fide POTS thing. And a Stress Echocardiogram that he ordered ages ago, and that everyone (myself included) forgot about, never happened. So… I need to do the stress echo, see him again, and meanwhile NO EXERCISING!!!! He was very clear on this point. “We just can’t have this,” he explained.
So this puts me on this disabled list until at least November 12, when I will see him again.
Meanwhile, a whole other body part is coming into play. I won’t go into the grizzly details, but it seems that I may have endometriosis. I am really pulling for this one, because if so, it’s fixable, and it could be causing all sorts of problems! Like dizziness and fatigue. Please, everyone send me your endometriosis horror stories– I mean how totally SICK you were and then how you were cured when they found it and got it out of there!
So on November 14, I need to have this procedure under general anesthesia. I’m more worried about the anesthesia than the procedure itself. I have to be under for 45 minutes to an hour. It’s laparoscopic, so only small cuts, but exploratory, so who knows what the hell they may find in there. They search around in your whole abdomen for trouble. I sort of hope there’s uterine tissue growing all over the place and this is why I don’t feel so good. If it’s internally bleeding all the time, that would help explain my anemia problem, and so on. But I don’t want it to be so bad that they have to switch over to an open procedure and I end up with a large abdominal incision, as happened to a friend of mine. What I don’t really want is a “Meh,” sort of result. Like, Yeah, there was a little bit here and there but no biggie. That would be disappointing! (I live in upside down world, so this makes sense to me.) It would be great if they could fix my hiatal/esophageal hernia while they are in there, but no. They claim it’s a whole different sort of doctor and a whole different thing. (I asked!)
As an aside, I love this new gyno I have. He likes things to be attractive. He actually cares! The whole place is full of interior design elements, fancy chairs, orchids, and new age music. When he handed me the brochure about my procedure, he took a moment to rant about the horrible graphic design. “This is a national organization,” he said. “I mean, can’t they do better than this? And why RED of all colors??” And when he came in to talk to me after my pelvic ultrasound, he announced, “I have scoopage!” I just love him. Someday when I can drink again, he would be a great guy to go to happy hour with.
So… Looks like mid-November will be another pivot point for me. Meanwhile, lots of varsity momming going on. We just had another major birthday party, which involved an epic cake I will post about soon. And then of course there’s Halloween to contend with!
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