Despite my conviction yesterday that I was oh so sick, I actually went to work (a little delayed) and also went to the heart specialist and had the Holter monitor (portable EKG machine) fastened. Together with it, and more disturbing, is a blood pressure monitor. Every half hour of the day (and every hour of the night, the nurse said) a shark bites my upper arm for a little while. Or so it feels. I have usually had a moderate blood pressure, but with the prediabetes I think it may be higher than ideal now. I am sure they will find out. And I am also sure there won’t be much deep sleep tonight.

Still, this is a grand improvement from how I felt yesterday. I still have the diarrhea, but it seems mostly harmless. I took an hour’s walk after work, not much less than usual.  (Actually I took two shorter rounds of half an hour each, so as to not get stranded somewhere far from home.) I felt no heart palpitations at all, but then I hardly ever do the first day after some days of rest. (Well, rest – I have been to work as usual, but by “rest” I mean “not walking fast for an hour or more after work each day”.)

Tomorrow I am scheduled for a workout test of the heart. It is probably the safest place except a hospital to do such a test, but I am still wary. I have not exercised hard since grade school, because of the asthma. I have an inhaler but I don’t use it, I just slow down before I get winded. I have not actually been winded for more than 40 years, I think. So I am bringing my asthma inhaler and hope they have a heart starter nearby as well. Still, this is a unique opportunity to learn whether I can continue to exercise, and perhaps more intensely than now. But I’m still going to try to explain the situation, and if they think it is too risky I am not going to insist.

Today I had an interesting experience with my heart rate again, which I think is related to the previous three times the last month or so. Unlike these times, I did not go to the emergency room: Partly because it was less intense, partly because I believe I already have the data I could get from there, and there was never any attempt at treatment except for a painkiller the first time. (Nor was this necessary.)

This time, my pulse while walking was noticeably LOWER than usual for the first half hour or so. Again it felt like the heart beat was irregular, but there is no reason to think this is true, since I have had this measured repeatedly and it seems to be exceptionally stable if anything. And I had no problem walking at a good pace. I did not try to run or walk at competition speed, remembering that last fall when I had to ride an ambulance, the day had started out with just such a low pulse, and I had tried to keep it up by pressing myself.

After about 40 minutes, things began to change. And one interesting detail, if not entirely safe for work. See, just before the onset of unusually high pulse, my scrotum began to contract to a very uncomfortable degree. What we menfolk might call a “nutcracker” experience. Usually this would require an ice cold bath or primal fear, none of which was around. But the interesting part is that I noticed the same thing to some degree in two of the three last episodes, for no noticeable reason then as well.

This makes me wonder if the first part of the rapid pulse may come not from the heart muscle itself, but spurred on by some other change in the body.

In any case, I have made a habit of not going too far from home even during long walks until we know more about this particular trouble. So I was about ten minutes from home. I slowed down, and the pulse stayed below 140, which is quite acceptable for a while. It also slowed down faster than the previous times once I came home. So far each of the episodes have been milder and more gradual than the one before. I assume this is a good thing.  In any case, my pulse is back in the enviable range now. (65 bpm sitting in front of my computer.)

“I’d love to go out and exercise, but for my health I had better stay on the couch and eat snacks.”

I don’t know about you, but to me that sounds hilarious. It also happens to be true for me. How did I end up in Bizarro world? Let us, in true Bizarro style, start at the end.

I stepped on the bath scales today and found the dreaded number 85 staring back at me. Actually 85.8 kg (189 lbs) but that is still too close for comfort. The actual weight depends on how food I have in my digestive tract at the time, of course, as well as  fluctuations in the water balance of the body. There is always a margin of error. But as I have mentioned before (?), 85 kg is around the weight where my heart will start racing at high speed (sometimes even at max pulse) at more or less random times, although most commonly during or after I take walk. Around 86 kg I experience increasingly frequent palpitations, or so it feels. There is some kind of increasing randomness of the heart at least.

It is to try to find out these two things that I need a Holter monitor, a portable EKG basically, measuring the heart activity in real life activity rather than while lying on my back.  But I can’t get that for a while due to the way health care is rationed here in Norway. So there is no point in triggering these things in the meantime. There may or may not be a risk to having them – I am not a cardiologist, but judging from the Internet they are not regarded as good things exactly – and they are quite unpleasant. On the other hand, I want to be able to provoke them easily when the Holter monitor arrives, which won’t happen if I am too fat. Ideally I should stay around 87 kg, which is usually fat enough to not trigger any irregularities, but something I can easily get rid of in a few days of walking.

But evidently the fattening project has failed me. Yesterday I took a short walk again, just half an hour or so, but of course the commute includes approximately 30 minutes of walking interspersed at various points (10 minutes to work and 20 minutes back, in addition to the bus ride) and then there’s the 20 minutes I walked during the lunch break. So I guess it all adds up. There were definitely some weird feelings about the heartbeats during the afternoon walk yesterday. So I was not really surprised to see my weight had gone down again.

I can’t help but find this amusing. Because I get horribly sick if I eat fat, I have to eat large quantities of carbs and I still can’t gain weight unless I stay very, very quiet. If I hadn’t been sick, I would have struggled with ever increasing fat like most people my age, probably. I certainly was heavier before 2005, and these things usually only go one way. So now I have to eat as much as I can without getting sick, and stay indoors on a sunny evening when the jogging shoes are beckoning.

There are probably literally millions of people who wished they were in my place. Whining about not being able to get fat is like whining about not having enough to do at work. Which, incidentally, I haven’t. My boss is super happy with me and has recently decided to give our team less to do. ^_^ I could have taken more phones, but I conveniently also have an illness that restricts my speaking. And one that restricts my traveling. I am all set! Better living through chronic illness!

Today the road is slippery from half-melted snow again, so I stay indoors after I got home from work. But I might have done that anyway. My heart palpitations are getting steadily worse as the days go by, after I got home from work today they seemed to occur at least once every ten seconds for some while. That is enough that I have to consider getting a doctor appointment again. I forgot the one I had in December last year, as it was months since last time and I had various other things on my mind. It should be easier to remember this time, if the symptoms continue. At least if they continue to get worse.

Palpitations are something almost everyone experiences, and not least in our days when coffee is considered a main food group, at least here in Scandinavia. To further confuse us, nervousness can cause them too, so if you have enough palpitations to make you nervous, they can cause more palpitations. Kind of like love and hate. There is a thin line between love and palpitations if you believe love songs, but that is hardly the problem for me. Rather, the exercise seems to be causing it.

Before the snowfall this winter, my heartbeat was getting so erratic some days on my way home from work that I could not really say whether my real pulse was fast or slow, because it was a jumble of double beat, beats and half beats. And now, after little more than a week with recommended exercise (more than 500 calories extra a day) I am growing closer to this again. This is just not normal, no matter how you look at it.

It probably does not help that I also have bradycardia. There is something just wrong with having a pulse of 50 when I have 66% of normal lung capacity.  I should have noticeably higher pulse than average, but this is as much lower as it should have been higher. So we already know that my heart does not quite know what it is doing, medically speaking. Of course for most people it is only figuratively speaking it is so. I am not quite sure which is the worst.

My heart is crazy. And I don’t mean that in a romantic way. Rather, it is the old blood pump, the organ that more than any other should benefit from me shedding a couple more pounds. It does its best to sabotage it, or so it seems.

See, I used to weigh just over 94 kg (208 lb) for many years. A little more some days, but never much, no matter that I ate what I wanted and moved no more than I wanted to. But then in Easter 2005 I had a mysterious illness, presumably of the liver judging from the symptoms. Since then, I have been unable to digest more than just a little fat each day. I also took up walking up and down hills in May that year, and between these things I lost 13% of my weight, down to 82 kg (180 lb). Not skeletal, but quite uncomfortable, as I was hungry even after meals and had to get up in the middle of the night to eat. So I was rather relieved when I put on a few more pounds, despite eating almost only carbohydrates. (Pasta in particular, lots and lots of pasta. But I also quite a bit of fruit yogurt.) This time my weight stopped on 89 kg (196 lb).

Last spring I started walking for an hour a day or so, mainly to ward off cancer, but later also to keep my pre-diabetes at bay. This is a fun and harmless activity, in general, and gives a great opportunity to think or meditate while walking. But it also causes me to lose a few pounds of weight before my appetite jumps up to compensate. And when I reach 85 kg (187 lb) weird things happen with my heart.

The first, and perhaps not so strange, is that my resting pulse falls. It is normally 55-60, which is pretty decent for a well-trained man (which I am not – I have not run more than a few steps since I was small, due to exercise asthma). When my weight comes down, my resting pulse creeps down to 50 or even below sometimes. That is just plain creepy: For someone with only 66% lung capacity, I ought to have a pulse of 80 or so. But there are no symptoms, so I assume my body is simply trying to save energy.

The next thing that happens is that my heart rhythm starts to get irregular. My heart will randomly beat twice as hard or not at all. This is also something that happens to a lot of people (especially if they drink coffee) and is not fatal in itself. However, people with this condition are more likely to die from sudden heart stop / heart flimmer if they exercise hard. Some people die during marathons and such each year, and these are they. Not much risk of me running a marathon, admittedly.

When any of these things fail to keep me indoors, my heart will suddenly start beating much faster during light exercise, or at random times – often a while after exercise – start racing at its maximum speed. (Around 190 now, I believe it was higher in 2005 when it did the same. That was the last time I was that slim.)  It goes on like this for perhaps 10 minutes, and remains much faster than usual for the rest of the day, even if I sit quietly.

This year I have only had one heart race episode, but the slow pulse and irregular beats seem to predictably occur every time I dip below 85 kg.

I have never heard of anyone else with this syndrome. I mean, I have heard of each of the three symptoms, they are not uncommon and are generally not considered dangerous in moderation. But the combination of them, ticking in one after another each time I lose weight, that is new to me. Then again, we are all unique, aren’t we?