September 2022

 The Athlete part of the title is finally coming true - I'm running again.  It's really feeble - I'm following the old style Couch to 5k which I have used many times before, but progress is almost non-existant.

I started with 1 min run/2 min walk and have now got to 1.5 min run/45 sec walk.  It's killing me!  Some of the running intervals are at 13 min miles pace!  I should be delighted that I am back running but instead I am hating how hard it is.

And now I have a terrible cold and feel awful so that's a week or so off.

To be frank, I'm pretty fed up.  It's completely irrational - I've had 20 visits to hospital (15 of them emergency admissions) in just over three years and here I am feeling depressed because running is so hard! In fact, the reason running is so hard IS because I have spent so much time in hospital in the last three years.  So I need to cut myself some slack.

I'm feeling forgotten too, by family and friends - they are bored with my travails by now and who can blame them? I feel old and slow and boring, I don't feel like I will ever be able to just run easily again.  I feel pretty ill today and I ache all over - hence the self pity I think.

And then in November I am going to London for yet another hospital visit - to have the telangiectasia part of the Hereditary Haemorrhagic Telangiectasia (HHT) condition treated by laser to try to prevent all the nose bleeds I've been having. One of them lasted 90 minutes recently - a constant steady drip into the sink.  I should be pleased that UCLH are so amenable to seeing me whenever I need to be seen, without a referral or any hassle.  I should also be glad that my HHT is not as bad as some poor souls - but instead I just feel demoralised.


Sorry for the depressing post

J xx

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jan 2023 Unhappy New Year

  4th January 2023 I ended my last post with a defiant "neither AFib nor HHT is gonna stop me" - until it did! During my rehab from the nose op I managed to hurt my knee so have now added even more physio to my list - underdeveloped adductors this time... Then mid December I started getting periods of tachycardia where my heart rate would go up to 100+ beats per minute.  I know this as a precursor to Afib but my arrhythmia nurses said not to panic and see how it went. How it went was that following a walk on 30 December I sat and had a cup of fruit tea at 11 am.  The tachycardia started and then flipped into full blown atrial fibrillation.  I decided to ignore it even though it was about 120 irregular beats per minute, but felt too ill and so was taken off to the big trauma hospital one hour away.  Not before I had a complete meltdown and was crying and saying, like a brat, "I don't want to go"! Usually I am seen in about an hour and hooked up to 'telemetry...
Read more

Something Good to report!

 TUESDAY, 28th March 2023 I saw my local cardiologist today.  He totally disagrees with the electrocardiologist at Royal Papworth who want to give me a fourth ablation.  Like me, he cannot see how a fourth will work where three failed after just a few months.  He reckons Amiodarone, which I have been on since February, has some horrid side-effects but on modern low doses these are rare indeed. Rather chillingly, he told me to go away and enjoy my life as in two or three years I would probably be back in Afib and it would "challenging" to control it.  I, the pessimist, interpreted that as "You will be doomed in three years" but Hubby (optimist) took it differently as 'they will do something different in three years or longer'.  Interesting!  Let's hope it lasts for years and years as I cannot face a fourth ablation for a while. As another interesting aside, he scoffed at the idea that my non-elite amounts of training would have caused my Afib.  He ...
Read more

Dronedarone

  So my last blog ended with me saying I had a lousy cold back in May 2022.  This developed into a nasty chest infection (but it wasn't Covid) and meant my return to work was delayed two more weeks!! I finally got back there on 21 June.  Oh the joy of feeling like the new girl yet again and finding that all the good tasks have been dished out to other people and I'm left with the menial tasks.  But then again, who can blame them?  I've been away as much as there the last three years.... sob! Even that return nearly never happened when, once again following a knap, I went into Afib on 18 June.  Luckily, after four hours, while stuck in resus in Addenbrookes Hospital it self-converted for the second time ever.  I like it when it does that as the recovery is very swift. At this stage I contacted my arrhythmia nurses at Papworth and updated them.  They, and my EP, were more adamant than ever that I needed a fourth ablation and I was still more adamant...
Read more