Well it's nearly a week since they fitted my pacemaker, so I'm beginning to get an idea of how I'm doing. The dressings are all off and I'm left with a neat two and a half inch scar just below my collar bone. Still a bit tender and I'm supposed to be going carefully for a while.
Thanks to my trusty smart watch I'm getting loads of stats to ponder over. Just over a week ago my average pulse rate was 38 bpm and my ECG trace was an intermittent scramble of random squiggles. Here's how it looks today after a short walk down"Dingly Dell" near our house.
So that's amazingly regular and a lot quicker. I must be getting double the blood flow to my muscles and brain.
I get lots of exercise stats from the watch too. Here are a few from our short walk.
This first one shows pulse rate and walking speed over the walk. You can see from the blue line see we stopped frequently to look at butterflies and (as it happens) wild raspberries. I don't think this app has a feature showing gps elevation so you can't see that there is a steep path towards the end.
So as you can see here we only did 15 minutes of aerobic exercise in a 20 odd minutes walk. Enough for me just now, I'm not supposed to stress the wound while the pacemaker and the wires settle in.
Here are overall figures. The watch keeps a record on my phone so I can watch my progress. Good innit?
In general I'm feeling quite a bit better. Of course I'm outrageously unfit because for the last few months my condition has prevented me from doing much exercise beyond very gentle strolls and no hills. So for now, so far, so good.
On the downside, if you would like me to umpire your next cricket match, I can only oblige if you promise not to hit a six because for the time being I am forbidden to lift my left arm above my head so I couldn't signal the six to the scorer.
Furthermore, anyone planning to exploit the long odds on me getting the taekwondo gold at the Paris Olympics had better put their money elsewhere as I am advised to give up contact sports. As for my cage fighting career, that has been cruelly snatched away before I ever got going. Well, you can't have everything.
Talking about contact sports, isn't that what people call boating when the bump into your boat? I'm not giving that up (I mean the boating not the bashing). We seem to be getting an alarming number of email alerts from CRT about damage to locks and gates lately. There must be some right idiots bashing about out there. I see yesterday someone managed to sink a boat in Cassiobridge lock. I hope it didn't belong to some unfortunate hire boat co. The lost deposit wouldn't cover much of the cost would it?
Toodle pip.
4 comments:
Wow, Neil! That's interesting. It must be quite riveting to see what's going on with your ticker now! I'll have to get a smartwatch for Koos too. So glad you're feeling better now! Long may it last.
Glad you and your pacemaker are settling in together.
I thank god (not that I believe) that my Dad didn't get one of those watches when he had his pacemaker fitted. I'd have been getting half hourly phone calls, a mobile phone and Windows 95 kept me busy for the last few years of his life.
Hopefully you'll be back on Herbie soon, we'll wave when we pass in a few weeks. Pip
Well, Neil, what a bonus for you - a pacemaker and a technology toy to watch it with. What could be better!
Excellent that it has your heart behaving much more appropriately, and great that you will soon be able to be out boating again.
Re the damage and degradation of locks etc, is it likely that some of it is due to CRT contractors/operatives not having been working during successive lockdowns, or is it all new damage?
Keep up the goodhearted progress,
Cheers, Marilyn
Great to hear that the pacemaker is working well.
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