I was reading about the ramifications of a cardiac arrest and the ramifications of a stroke. I wrote a post about it, but didn’t really come to any conclusions other than I’m really lucky not to have to do months if not years of rehab (though I might have preferred that to dealing with the deep family dysfunction. This is easy for me to say, however, because I don’t have to do it).
This post is not about that, though. At least not directly. It’s more about knowing what is and isn’t a warning sign that something like that might happen again. Here’s the thing. Since my two cardiac arrests and stroke weren’t triggered because of the usual reasons (heart problems for the former and narrowed blood vessels for the latter. Well, the latter might have happened, but not for the usual reasons. I just learned there’s something called a transient ischemic stroke, which is probably what I had), how am I supposed to prevent it from happening again?
I just read the ways to prevent a stroke on the Mayo Clinic website and I already do most of them. The biggest one is losing weight and I have complicated feelings about that. I won’t get into that for this post, but suffice to say that I’m always suspicious of the insistence to lose weight as the be-all/end-all for any reason. But I’m already eating five fruits/veggies a day, not smoking (being unconscious for a week took care of that for me), exercising every day, not drinking, not having diabetes, and not doing drugs. The only other one I have to keep an eye on is having sleep apnea. I’ve never had a sleep study, but I’m pretty sure I have it.
As for cardiac arrest, my heart is in great condition. My heart doc has said it. My labs have said it. My heart monitor result has said it. My doc emphasized that the cardiac arrests were not because there was anything wrong with my heart–it was the pneumonia. Angiogram said there were no rips or blockages in my heart–which is great! I’m getting an EEG/EKG on Monday and then talking to my heart doc a week later. Again, this is just checking in and making sure everything is running ok. I’m not expecting anything to show up in the EEG that is untoward or harrowing because there has been nothing bad so far. I expect my heart doc to give me the green light again.