Why "Fat Free Freedom" ?

Part One, or, Fat Free Freedom - what a name!

It has special significance to my wife and I. If you read my profile along the left side of the page, you'll discover a little bit about why my wife and I are on this journey. Allow me, in this first blog post, to give you the first half of the story. I'll post the second installment tomorrow, and once that's behind us, we can get to the fun stuff - like eating! (It's a sad commentary perhaps, but meals are still the high points of my day.)

In 2007 my wife and I moved from Walnut Grove, Minnesota (yep - THAT Walnut Grove - Little House on the Prairie, On the Banks of Plum Creek, etc.) to the northern suburbs of Denver, Colorado. I had accepted a position at the University of Denver, and usually started my days early in order to beat the brutal I-25 rush-hour traffic. My office was on the second floor of an older building on campus, so I'd climb the stairway every morning, arriving winded at the top. After about six months at DU I registered for a winter quarter math class - Differential Equations (don't ask). The class was on the opposite side of the campus from my office, so I had the opportunity to hike across campus each weekday morning. I had noticed that as the weather got colder an ache developed in my left shoulder as I made the trek to the Math building. I had been a firefighter, an EMT, and had worked in the ER of a busy county hospital, so I was well aware of the symptoms of angina pectoris - pain resulting from insufficient flow of blood (and hence oxygen) to the heart muscle. But this was just a shoulder ache. No sweating, no shortness of breath, no crushing sensation in my chest. It was just a shoulder ache.

I had been seeing an electrophysiologist since my arrival in Colorado. I had developed heart rhythm issues while living in Minnesota, and my doctor in Colorado had me on meds to keep my rhythm regular. I called him up, and asked him about the shoulder ache. "Don't worry about it." was his reply. "I don't know what's causing it, but it's not your heart, because your treadmill test was clean."

Fine, I thought. Except for one minor, nearly insignificant little thing; I hadn't had a treadmill test in years, and my Colorado doc didn't have those records. He was confusing me with another patient! 

I called him back and told him I hadn't had a treadmill test. "Oh!", he said. "So you want to schedule a treadmill test then?" Caught off guard, I answered in the affirmative. But I recall thinking that it was sort of pointless, because I just had a shoulder ache. It wasn't  a heart problem.

A week later I'm on the treadmill. I'm wired up to a computer that's displaying my heart rhythm, and there's an IV in my right arm. On the other end of the IV is a nurse with a syringe of radioactive dye. She will inject the dye into the IV tubing once my heart rate hits 140 beats per minute. It doesn't take long for me to get to that point, and she's about to push the plunger when I suddenly feel light-headed, and about to pass out. The computer starts screaming. The other nurse yells, "he's in V-Fib!!!" (Wrong. It was ventricular tachycardia. I could read the EKG even through the mental fog.) They hit the kill switch (what an appropriate name!) on the treadmill, as I collapsed to my knees. They maneuvered me to a gurney, and at some point in that process my heart rhythm returned to normal. The room was now buzzing with doctors, nurses, and technicians. How embarrassing! And how scary.

After some time, one of the physicians in attendance spoke. "We'd like you to continue the test." 

I'm thinking to myself, did I end up at the mental hospital by accident? Is this guy nuts? I politely declined the opportunity to get back on the treadmill. 

He responded, "No, not the treadmill. We'll use a chemical to stress your heart, then we can inject the dye and see what kind of blood flow your heart has." 

"No way", I said, "not if there's a chance that I have to go through anything like what I just experienced." 

"No, I think it'll be OK", he answered.

Oh goody. That made me feel SO much better.  He "thinks" it'll be OK. The eight or so people in the room, surrounding my gurney, waited silently for my response. A nurse was holding my hand. Having just experienced a potentially fatal arrhythmia, brought on, I was sure, by the physical stress to my heart, I made the only logical decision I could make. I let them do their chemical stress test. I figured I was surrounded with people that could bring me back if I checked out. Much better to have problems in the hospital than on the freeway, I reasoned. However, I can say, without the slightest hesitation, that I'll NEVER let them do that to me again. It's a horrible sensation - one I can't even put words around. But, I got through it without any weird arrhythmias, or dying, and they injected the dye as planned. So off we went to radiology so they could scan my heart while the dye was active. 

That's when things took a turn for the worse.

(I'll wrap this up in my next post.)