Dr. Crippen is the author of this book and also a practicing chiropractor. His journey into a cure for his migraines led to his expertise on holistic health. This form of medicine treats the body as a whole, instead of just throwing medications at symptoms and hoping they go away.

Anyone who has had a health problem that doctors were unable to help you with can strongly relate to Dr. Crippen’s story that he tells in this book, of searching for answers and being unable to find them in a broken system.

I can strongly relate to this. When my health fell apart in 2014-2016, I had all sorts of crazy symptoms. Thankfully, I had one provider who thought outside of the box. If it weren’t for this one cardiologist I had, I would have never figured out that it was one part of my diet causing all of my problems. (In my case, it was gluten, and you read more about that here.)

So without further ado, here is Dr. Crippen. He is sharing with us a snippet directly from from his new book, Timeless Youth.

***Disclaimer: If you purchase through Amazon links on my site, I do collect advertising fees.***

“Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone.”

ALBERT EINSTEIN

Dr. Lisa Saunders, a medical doctor, journalist, and professor at the Yale School of Medicine, whose New York Times column “Diagnosis” was the inspiration for the TV show House, wrote:

“A decade ago, I stood alongside my 99 fellow freshmen as we were welcomed into the ranks of medicine in a ‘white coat ceremony.’ Here, on our first day of med school, we were presented with the short white coats that proclaimed us part of the mystery and the discipline of medicine. During that ceremony, the dean said something that was repeated throughout my education: half of what we teach you here is wrong – unfortunately, we don’t know which half.”

That quote, often repeated by the Dean of the Yale School of Medicine, was originally spoken by Charles Sidney Burwell, a past Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard, over 50 years ago. It is just as true today as when it was first spoken.

This book will explain why half of what is taught in medical school is wrong.

What if there was a better way? What if, instead of starting with disease and the parts and pieces that make up the body, we started instead with the principles that were true in the beginning and are still true today? 

The first principle of holistic health is The Yellowstone Principle: The Whole Is Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts

In the early 1990s, conservationists with Yellowstone National Park faced a titanic problem. Over the previous 70 years, an ecosystem that was once in balance was spiraling out of control, and conservationists were at a loss to reverse the trend.

One obvious symptom of the change was the ballooning population of elk. But this wasn’t the only change. Many of the trees were losing their bark, which led to a decline in the aspens and cottonwoods. Also, the songbird population had decreased.

Other changes in the Yellowstone ecosystem included a decrease in the beaver population, erosion of the streams, and a decrease in river animals such as muskrats, ducks, fish, reptiles, and amphibians — many symptoms of a diseased ecosystem.

All the symptoms of change, from beavers to rivers to elk, were connected by a single cause.

The ballooning population of elk led to an overgrazing of tree bark, which led to fewer aspens and cottonwoods, destroying the habitat of the songbirds and providing less wood for beavers to make their dams. Fewer dams resulted in erosion of the streams, and a reduced habitat for muskrats, ducks, fish, reptiles, and amphibians. Naturalists hoped they could attack the problem at its source — the growing elk population.

In the 1930s, the park services started trapping and moving the elk out of the park, and then, when that didn’t work, shooting them. This went on for decades. While one symptom improved (the population of elk did decrease) the other symptoms, the trees, birds, and beavers were largely unchanged.

What should be done next?

Plant more aspen and cottonwood trees? Introduce more beavers into the park? Dredge the streams and rivers to restore the wildlife habitats? All were logical — capable of treating one symptom or another — but none would restore balance to the ecosystem.

Why? Because, as the conservationists learned, the solution to the changes in Yellowstone would only be found by understanding the ecosystem as a whole, and not a disparate set of unconnected symptoms.

While the changes in Yellowstone’s landscape were becoming more apparent in the 1990s, the change started in the early 1900s.

When the U.S. Park Service took control of Yellowstone from the U.S. Army in 1916, they systematically killed all the wolves in the park, killing all 134 over the next 10 years. From this point until the early 1990s, there were no wolves in Yellowstone as wolves were a deemed a threat to cattle and livestock.

To make the ecosystem whole once again, naturalists could either kill more elk, plant more trees, add fish, feed songbirds, build dams, or, quite simply, they could reintroduce wolves.

Fourteen wolves were reintroduced in 1995 and 17 more the following year. Thirty-one total wolves were added to a 2.2-million-acre national park spanning parts of Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho.

This seemingly small addition produced a series of remarkable changes.

First, the wolves, a natural predator of the elk, helped thin the elk population.

Then, the potential threat of being eaten changed the behavior of the elk. The elk moved from the valleys and the gorges, where they could be easily hunted, to the areas of heavy timber. This allowed the bare areas of the valleys and gorges to regenerate.

Songbirds and migratory birds returned to the new regenerating trees. The beavers, with their food source of trees restored, began to proliferate. More beavers led to more dams. Otters, muskrats, ducks, and fish that relied on the dams for habitats returned.

Increasing vegetation stabilized the riverbanks, reversed the erosion in the riverbeds, and created a healthier ecosystem.

The changes in Yellowstone could not be understood by looking at only one species, one location, or one plant. The interventions aimed at treating a single problem produced only short-lived changes, and none restored health to the whole.

Instead, to restore balance to the ecosystem, all the pieces must be considered as parts of the whole, where every part impacts every other part.

Just as an ecosystem is made up of many individual plants and animals, of a variety of species, each independent yet interconnected, the human body is also made of many independent parts — cells, organs, tissues, and systems, that interconnect to form a whole.

This idea of holism fits within the context of nature. When we introduce wolves back into Yellowstone, we accept the cascade of changes as natural consequences. In nature, we understand that a change to one part affects the whole.

But somehow, along the way, we started to view the body as separate from nature.

Instead of seeing the body as a whole ecosystem, the way we might with a national park like Yellowstone, allopathic medicine treats the body as if it operates according to a different set of rules.

The body, the thinking goes, is not a whole but instead a collection of parts. This is called reductionism, the idea that a complex system can be understood by understanding the pieces that make it up. It is this thinking that lets us to cut out a cancer from the body without changing the conditions that led it to grow in the first place.

Reductionistic thinking lets us take an antibiotic for a cold — often without knowing if the symptoms are even caused by bacteria — instead of asking why the immune system did not fight off the bug in the first place.

In another context, reductionistic thinking allows for the surgical replacement of a knee without evaluating the health of the whole.

Specifically, without asking how and why the knee degenerated in the first place. And no, getting older is not a sufficient reason to have a bad knee. My favorite questions for patients who use the “I’m just getting old, Doc” explanation for knee pain is to ask, politely of course, “Well, if that is the case, how old is your good knee?”

The idea of reductionism is not universal, but it is foundational to the medical idea of health. Perhaps, it came from the Industrial Revolution with its proliferation of machines to increase output and its concurrent migration into cities and out of nature.

Or, perhaps, from the revamping of medical education that occurred after the Flexner Report, in 1910, with its increased focus on scientific research in the basic sciences like physiology and biochemistry (both of which focus on the parts of the body rather than the whole) at the expense of holism. However it happened, the medical idea of health mandates that we see the human body as a collection of parts, separate from nature.

This change had a profound effect on our health.

It is the difference between shooting elk and restoring wolves.

The idea of thinking of the health of the whole is foundational to how we see nature.

We do not need to consider the health of 2,000,000+ acres of a national park to see the principle of holism. We can observe the same principle in a single leaf.

When it comes to health, plants are simple. They are not like humans. Plants don’t complain. They don’t forget to eat. They don’t sabotage their health with Oreos and reality television. Plants grow. They add carbon dioxide (CO2) to sunlight to create food. They survive.

Because of this, healing plants is easy.

A healthy plant needs optimum amounts of three things: sunlight, water, and nutrients (found in healthy soil). A sick plant, one with brown leaves, needs optimal amounts of three things: sunlight, water, and nutrients (found in healthy soil). That’s it; that’s the whole list. The presence or absence of disease does not change what the plant needs to create health. It may need more or less of each, but healthy plants are the inevitable result of optimal amounts of these three inputs.

But what if things were different? Let’s imagine we enter a world of plants, a world that, for simplicity, we’ll call Plant World.

Let’s imagine Plant World has advanced well past the antiquated ideas of ensuring plants need optimal amounts of sunlight, water, and nutrients. How old fashioned! How antiquated! Instead, in progressive and innovative Plant World, plants are treated like people, following the three-step allopathic model disease care diagnose disease, treat with drug or surgery, eliminate the symptom or disease.

Step one, diagnose disease.

In plant world, before a sick plant can be helped, it first needs — of course! — a diagnosis. How can you treat a plant if you don’t name the disease? In the allopathic plant disease care, as with humans, the disease is given a name, often with a Greek root. We’ll call it Brown Leafitis.

In this progressive system, researchers and plant doctors search for a cure for Brown Leafitis. Lots of money, public and private, is spent researching pharmaceutical treatments and surgical techniques (step two!) to treat the symptoms of Brown Leafitis.

The allopathic plant disease care system even has teams of molecular biologists searching for a miracle drug that will cause an already sick plant’s leaves to turn from brown back to green. Other promising treatments include, covering the leaves with spray paint and the surgical removal of the brown leaf (a leafectomy, if you will). How progressive! How technologically advanced!

Even better, Plant World elected a government that demands equal access for all diseased plants to essential plant medications and includes a team of lobbyists petitioning Plant Congress and the Federal Plant Drug Administration to have medications approved for the new epidemic of Brown Leafitis.

Luckily — for the plants — Plant World disease care doesn’t exist.

We don’t waste our time and money on pharmaceutical drugs or tiny plant surgeries to treat Brown Leafitis. Instead, we restore health in a plant by ensuring the plant has exactly what it needs to create health (sunlight, water, and nutrients (found in healthy soil)).

By assuring a plant has the nutrients it needs, the plant returns to health and the symptom of brown leaves go away, or, better yet, never appear in the first place. Giving the plant water, sun, and healthy soil is healthcare.

We recognize, intuitively, that a brown leaf is not a disease of the leaf, but rather a sign of a problem within the whole plant. We intuitively provide healthcare to plants, but we disastrously provide disease care to humans.

What the medical idea of health seems to forget is that we humans are not reductionistic machines but instead operate under the principle of holism — like plants!

In the case of my headaches, taking pain relieving medications sometimes helped with the symptom of head pain, but didn’t make me healthier. How could I be healthier taking a chemical that (supposedly) helped pain yet at the same time damaged my liver and kidneys?

Doctors who understood the principles of health would take a different approach.

They would see pain in the head not as an isolated symptom but instead as a sign of dysfunction of the whole, much like we view a brown leaf on a plant. Instead of prescribing a drug to treat the symptom, the treatment might include the human equivalent of water, sunlight, and healthy soil needed to restore health.

So how do we find those basic first principles, the human equivalents of water, sunlight, and healthy soil that create health?

We must begin by seeing a disease of a part as instead a dysfunction of the whole.

Timeless You-th tells the story of my struggle to find a cure for my crippling headaches while navigating the established medical system. My headaches persisted and worsened despite seeking the best medical treatment available, including top doctors and pharmaceutical drugs. The overall goal of my book is to teach you five foundational principles of health so that you, too, can create a lifetime of timeless youth.

Timeless You-th is your go to resource to maximize your health without drugs and surgery. Grab a copy on Amazon and share!

The post Why Holistic Health is Life Changing: New Book by Dr. Crippen appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.

The Linq monitor is a small loop recorder, about the size of a small person’s pinky finger.

Recently I received an email from a reader (in the Netherlands, believe it or not) asking me for more details about the Linq heart monitor process.

I had the Linq heart monitor inside my chest, near my heart, for three years. The Linq gave my electrophysiologist more information about the arrythmias I was experiencing.

This diagnosis of a serious heart arrhythmia can scare the living daylights out of a person. I want anyone who reads this to know that I will answer any questions you have about the experience.  Happy to! I remember when I was first diagnosed with non-sustained ventricular tachycardia, I had a billion questions. Yet, doctors often do not share with you half as much as you would like for them to.

The Linq monitor reads the rhythm of your heart. It is not equipped to correct or jump start your heart like a pacemaker or defibrillator.

Instead, the Linq collects data and sends that data to a physician. For more information about the Linq, here is their website.

I cannot talk as much to the medical side of it. Though rest assured, after my diagnosis, I read two different books and countless internet articles on the topic. Sometimes, just for the fun of freaking myself out, I will go online and Google research papers for the latest information on NSVT.  Why am I this way? Ha! Such misery I bring to myself on purpose! But isn’t it best to know how to take care of yourself with any condition?

Each doctor I saw had a different opinion of how serious my problem is.

I had to see many different cardiologists and electrophysiologists because we moved from California to Georgia, then to Virginia, and finally to Maryland. We moved three times in the three years I had this monitor embedded in my chest.

First, and most importantly, please know that I would not be afraid to get a Linq monitor for a second.

I just had mine removed after three years this past October because my battery died. In 2019, I went a whole year with only 30 off-beats. That was great news. So they decided I did not need to be monitored anymore.

The Linq implantation and removal procedures were so easy.

Where do they put the monitor?

My Linq monitor was on the chest but above the breasts. It was to the left, since the heart is to the left slightly. It’s pretty close to the breastbone. The incision is only 1 centimeter or so. It was almost invisible after two years, but now that it has been reopened it is a little ugly again. It is tiny and low enough that it only shows if I’m wearing a swimsuit. 

For the procedure, I was wide awake, and it was not scary at all. They sedate you for the procedure, but I asked not to be. I hate that drugged feeling, so I preferred to rely on local anesthesia since the procedure is quick.

On the day of the first procedure, I was extremely nervous because I didn’t know what was coming. Looking back, I have had foot procedures that were much more painful. The chest seems less sensitive somehow. This was not bad at all.

Afterwards, yes, I could feel the Linq in there, and it was barely visible for the entire three years.

The surgical site was not painful past the first two weeks of soreness. I had what I thought were way more heart arrhythmias after they put it in. However, I think it may have been the sensation of the Linq embedding itself into me rather than an actual heart problem. Over time, I could feel the Linq less and less, but still I could feel it. It didn’t hurt. It was like how you feel glasses on your face or shoes on your feet, sort of. Now it is out, but sometimes I think I still feel it, and I have to remind myself that it’s gone. It bothered me more in the beginning, so don’t despair. You will get used to it.

All you could see was a little bump, where the top of it was near my incision. It looked like a tiny tumor. (I know, ugh). For a while, the doctors I saw planned to replace the old Linq when the battery ran out with a new one because I had a long arrhythmia run that they didn’t like back in 2018. That was a thirteen beat run of ventricular tachycardia. But I did so well the next year they decided against it.

Someone asked me if my bra or shirt rubbed up against the incision and bothered me. I can assure you it was completely unaffected by my bra because the Linq sits above the breasts.

The Linq Monitor is Wi-fi equipped. It comes with a little box you keep by your bed.

The box sends the information back to your doctor at midnight each night. It was not a hassle. I had three different doctors during the three years because we are a military family who moved three times. My Linq monitor was set to not even record my arrhythmias unless they went over 16 beats. The only reason my thirteen beat run showed up was because I used the clicky-stick they give you with the monitor. You hold it on your chest and click it when you feel symptoms. Through the entire three years, I only used the symptom stick a handful of times.

The reason my monitor was set to only record long runs was that my doctor decided that was the point at which they would have to do something to fix the problem.

Otherwise, I do not have NSVT often. I was on medication and not considered to be a sudden death risk. We knew I do not have it too often because during a week long monitor, I did not record any NSVT at all. On the twenty-four hour Holter monitor, I had a six-beat run of NSVT.

With two of my doctors, they rarely looked at the reports and never reported back to me what any of the reports said unless I had an appointment. However, I had a more involved cardiology office in Georgia. They would actually call me each month and read me my report. That was so nice!

When they discovered a long run of v-tach, they immediately set up an appointment with the electrophysiologist for me, getting ready to look into an ablation.

However, I moved to D.C. before I had time to follow through with that appointment. It is very hard to have good continuity of care as a military family. The D.C. doctors decided to do more testing instead. In fact, they said I would need a new cardiac MRI every few years.

Once all the testing was done, and my heart was behaving quite nicely, the D.C. doctors decided to just leave me on my medicine and not do an ablation or anything.

Processing all the feelings…

When the doctor removed my Linq, I was a little annoyed at his lack of knowledge of my history. To be fair, I routinely saw his nurse practitioner, who I like and trust. I met the actual electrophysiologist once and explained my story to him, but he did not seem to remember. After my removal procedure, he said, “I’m sure this will never happen again, and you will be fine.”

Say what? Oh man, this guy. Obviously details were lost with the second hand information. Even when I read my chart I could see he did not know much about my history. He seemed to think I came straight from California to the D.C. area. Did he have any knowledge of my problems in 2018? I am not sure. Heart arrhythmias are not a thing that you have several times and then never have again. I had several documented cases of NSVT, in the span of three years, so I am under no delusions that it will “never happen again.”

I have met several women who have been through this before me.

They had the exact same problem I had. Their symptoms also would disappear a year at a time and then reappear. With two of the three women I have talked to, they eventually had a long run, which was a near death experience. They passed out in their home, and then had the ablation to kill off the errant cells causing the arrhythmia. When my doctor told me I would not have any more arrhythmias, I told him about the stories I had heard. I calmly but firmly told him that I knew it would happen again, but that I am okay. He did not argue with me.

That left me feeling sort of alone. It can seem lonely as a patient when you feel like you cannot find a doctor who listens and helps. I have learned not to put too much hope in a doctor. They are just practicing medicine. I let them see what they can do to help, but I also do my own research and plenty of prayer. The Lord knows. With me moving every one to three years, I do not have any doctors who actually know me. How many times can I re-explain all my health issues? Bleh. I grew tired of it. These days I do not bother with a physician unless I really have to.

Having the Linq monitor removed felt like this major milestone.

I knew I should be ecstatic to be free of it, to know that the doctors deemed me “okay.” Yet, I felt a little sad. Without that monitor, I had to truly trust that I was fine. Now there are no alerts sent out if I have an unusually long run of NSVT.

I think I was also feeling down because of other life circumstances, though. Everything I do has to be planned around my husband’s work schedule and my children’s school schedules. It was so impossible to find a day that the doctors and Alan could agree on. When I finally scheduled it, the boys were out of school.

We had to bring our two youngest sons to the hospital with us. Alan managed them and took them out to eat, so it all went really well, thankfully. When it was all over, the doctor gave me my final talk. Then he said, “I am going to go out and get your family and let them come back to see you.”

“Great!” I smiled. I looked forward to being encouraged by my family.

Then I was disappointed when the doctor came back in and said, “I talked to them and told them you’re doing great and about ready to go.”

Doc looked at me funny. I think he was not sure how to tell me that my husband not only told him he was not going to come back and see me.

I could tell from just his look that they were not coming. It might sound ridiculous that this was a let down. But after you have opted to stay awake through a surgery where they open up your chest, dig around in there, pull something out, sew you back up, and then get details of your history wrong while they talk to you, you feel discouraged and you just want your loved ones to come and stand beside you. At least, that is how I felt.

So here is my last surgery tip:

Talk about who is going to come back to your recovery room in advance. Let them know if you want them to come see you or not. Alan thought keeping the kids in the waiting room was what I would want to give me some space. I have been on stay-at-home Mom duty for fourteen years, and doctor appointments are like a big day out for me. However, I felt sad that they didn’t come. Talking about expectations beforehand is a good idea. The doctor probably thought we were separated or something.

The good news

The good news is that so long as I keep taking my beta blockers everyday, I truly am just fine. My heart is also sometimes borderline low functioning, not bad, just sometimes my heart doesn’t pump quite as efficiently as it should. Other times it is normal. It depends on how well I have been taking care of myself. I do still get more tired than the other members of my household.

I am so grateful that the Linq monitor findings helped the doctors to come to the conclusion that I do not need any kind of surgery and am not at risk for sudden death. This is wonderful news.

I hope this answers all your questions about what it’s like as a Linq patient.

If it would be of help to me, I would gladly have another Linq monitor. It was not a problem at all. Feel free to ask any questions you have. It is frustrating how little info they put out. If you would like to hear the whole story of my Linq monitor insertion procedure, you can read that here.

The post What it was Like to Wear a Linq Heart Monitor for Three Years appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.

The day before yesterday I made a trip to D.C. to see my cardiology team. For more back story on my heart issues, you can read this page. It’s a diagnosis I’ve had for 3 years now.

At the beginning, my heart was having all sorts of symptoms, beating hard, beating fast, feeling exhausted, etc. They ran tests, they found a run of NSVT. NSVT stands for non-sustained ventricular tachycardia.

I tried a couple of different arrhythmic drugs, and I couldn’t tolerate them. What worked best was sticking with Propanolol, a common beta blocker that keeps my heart beating slow and steady, slow as in normal. And as we all know from the tortoise, slow and steady is exactly what we want.

A linq monitor was inserted into my chest to keep an eye on my condition. If an episode of NSVT went to long or happened too often, we would look at doing an ablation.

Most of the time I was fine. I took my medicine everyday, and I was fine. This beta blocker changed my life. I absolutely love it. I used to get these body-shaking adrenaline rushes when I would get stressed, and it has never happened again since I began Propanolol.

Last year, as I was working on our move from Georgia, I had a longer episode, and as a result of that I had to go through all the testing again. Ablation was back on the table.

First, I had an MRI (my 2nd cardiac MRI). It showed slightly low heart functioning on one side, so then I had to get an echocardiogram to get another look at it.

For the echo, I knew I needed to pass that with flying colors to stay out of surgery. I drank lots of water, abstained from caffeine, and took my heart medicine before I went in there for the echo. Even better, the echocardiogram technician turned out to be a very talkative middle-aged lady who put me completely at ease, which always makes my heart behave itself. Stress is surprisingly powerful.

My echo came back looking beautiful. I passed with flying colors. Everyone was satisfied.

The winter and spring passed with no incidents. Then lately I noticed that my monitor, which I keep beside my bed, has stopped communicating with my implant. Normally, the implant downloads its info to the monitor base each evening, and the base sends the info to the computer at my cardiology office.

Well, it hasn’t been working since July 4th. Hmmm. So I emailed my nurse practitioner, and she said they were tracking that my battery was depleted. Linq monitors only last 3 years. I got mine in May of 2016, so this is right on time.

They set me up an appointment, and I went down there.

First, I go to the pacemaker clinic and have my heart monitor read by their machines. All looked good. I’ve only had 30 errant beats this year.

They left the whole decision of whether or not to put in a new Linq monitor up to me. I just volleyed the decision back to them. I am at peace if they are. I’ve gone a year before having trouble again before, so I’m not kidding myself. It will come back, but so long as it only comes back in short waves, and doesn’t affect my quality of life, I’m okay.

I said, “Well, what do y’all think? If you think I should put a new one in, I’m fine. If you think it’s unnecessary, I’m okay with not doing it too.”

The NP and the electrophysiologist talked it over, and they decided to simply remove the device and not put in a new one.

As for my medicine, I will probably ALWAYS take Propanolol. It has helped me a ton, so it stays.

I’m way too busy taking care of 4 boys all day to do this over the summer, and we still have a month of summer vacation left. Alan is too busy for me to do it in September, so we will take it out in October.

It’s good news, and from now on I only have to go to the cardiologist when I’m having symptoms. All good news, and yet it still feels weird to me.

Am I happy to lose the wifi-equipped device that has been with me 3 years now? Yes, but at the same time I pretty much feel sad about all of life right now. Sad that I’m out of my comfort zone, AGAIN. Sad that Alan isn’t home much. Sad that most of my children don’t have any friends here yet. Sad that my family is so far away, with no end in sight for that. Sad.

I’m not the depressed, can’t get out of bed, level of sad. It’s just sort of a quietly underlying subconscious sad, a wistful feeling. Maybe that’s a better way to put it. It’s not that I’m sad. It’s more like I’m wistful and contemplative. Change has happened, and I’m not done adjusting to it.

I think once the procedure is over and done, I’ll feel pretty excited and more like a healthy person again though.

You gotta take the hills with the valleys in life. This move is just another hill to climb. Will do. We’ll climb that hill one step at a time.

⁵ A wise man will hear, and will increase learning; and a man of understanding shall attain unto wise counsels:
⁶ To understand a proverb, and the interpretation; the words of the wise, and their dark sayings.
⁷ The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction.
⁸ My son, hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother:
⁹ For they shall be an ornament of grace unto thy head, and chains about thy neck.

Proverbs 1:5-9

The post NSVT Update: A Turn for the Better appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.

I had no idea what to expect, so I thought I’d write this for newbies like me who’d like a heads up, complete with my humorous commentary, of course. I’d had MRIs before, but a heart MRI is performed much differently than a musculoskeletal one, as I’ve had in the past.

I was a little nervous to begin with about the IV and the dye because when I’m not feeling well or when I’m cold, it’s about impossible to get an IV into my veins. Go figure. Both problems were in place that day. They brought me nice, toasty hospital socks. I got to take them home with me too. Yes! Souvenir!!

So it was all very low-key. This is not something to be afraid of. I went back, put on my scrubs, and re-emerged. The scrub top was large enough for several of me, and it had one tie.

I go back to the waiting room, and in walks Mike, nice attractive man my age, there to run my MRI. Of course, all medical staff that must see me naked always seem to be male. Always. “Well, that’s okay,” I thought, “I get to keep my top and my bottoms on today; this one’s noninvasive. I can be calm. Calm. Stop smiling so much. Don’t be nervous. Be cool.”

“You have your shirt on backwards,” he said. “I gotta hook up the EKG, so it opens to the front. But that’s okay. We’ll get you a smaller one, and you can change first. Did they tell you anything about what to expect?”

No, obviously not…I changed shirts. The neck hole of the thing was cut all the way down to my stretched out belly button. Oh well.

I headed back out and hunted Mike down again. He told me, “Here’s the bathroom. You might want to go ahead and go to the bathroom first.”

“Nah, I’m okay.”

“You sure? This is going to last over an hour.”

Say what???

I decided it was best to be a compliant patient, and go use the bathroom. I laughed, “Ha! Yeah, I go through this with my kids all the time. I’ll go ahead and go.”

So this was a one man show. Mike had to coach me, explain the gown to me, hook me up to an IV, put the dye in, and take all the MRI photos.

Only we didn’t get to do exactly all of that as planned. I warned him about my veins. He scoffed at my warning, “Eh, I do this all the time. I pride myself on never sticking a patient twice.”

Oh, Mike. You just had to say it.

My veins were not having it. You can find my veins, but it’s not so easy to get into them with a needle. I’m used to this. They often have trouble, but it was so bad that day. He tried four or five different veins, and no dice. Finally, he gave up and took the MRI pictures without the dye.

Drat. I was so looking forward to having neon blood. Wait, no I wasn’t, so it was fine by me.

Besides the dye, which I didn’t get to experience, there are several things different about a heart MRI. You are also hooked up to an EKG machine, your head is all the way into the tunnel, and you have to constantly hold your breath. The tunnel is literally like two inches from your nose, and it bothered me for the first 5 minutes, especially combined with, “Take a breath, not a super deep breath but a shallow breath and hold it.”

“Okay, breathe.”

Over and over and over again. Literally about 30 times you hold your breath for various amounts of seconds and then let it go.

For a brief minute, towards the beginning, I felt like I was hyperventilating in a tiny tunnel. My chest started to rattle, and I wanted to drink the air as deep as possible.

But then my short little panic was over, and it wasn’t hard at all.

The MRI technologist was so nice. I felt bad for him that he had to deal with my hard, stubborn veins. I felt silly for having been so nervous about this really. However, I still stopped at the 7-11 on the way home and bought a Snickers ice cream bar as a consolation prize for my long afternoon at the hospital.

By the way, if you’re reading this in preparation for your own MRI, leave a comment and let me know how it goes! I promise it isn’t bad at all, a little draining with all the breathing stuff, but not bad.

The post What to Expect at a Heart MRI appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.

JD keeps me young. Thank you, JD!!

Many people develop heart problems while they are still young, but trust me, I’ve sat in the cardiology waiting room enough to know that I am nowhere near the average age. Most people in there have a walker and an accompanying nurse.

In fact, the receptionists sometimes assume that I’m there with an elderly patient that I walked in after.

“Wait. Are you with Mrs. Hammerstein?”

“No, no, I have a 3:00 appointment.”

Wednesday is my heart MRI. I’ve had an embarrassing number of MRIs in the past year, and I don’t expect anything bad to show up on this one. I wouldn’t even mind getting this MRI, except that the idea of dye coursing through my veins and my heart gives me the eebidy-jeebidies.

Yes, I reserve the right to remain a medical chicken.

I am chicken. I’d rather skip this mess and hope these problems just go away on their own. Some people totally don’t get that, and I don’t know how to make them understand.

“April, MRIs are nothing to be afraid of. The dye doesn’t hurt.”

“I know. It just sounds icky, and it makes me feel queasy to think about it.”

“Well, ablations don’t hurt either. You don’t have anything to worry about.”

Yes, thank you so much for these comforting words of empathy. Doesn’t matter, there’s something about the idea about running a wire up through my arteries and into my heart that, yes, makes my legs tingle, my nose crinkle, and yes, it just gives me the willies.

I’m not unwilling to do it, but that doesn’t mean I have to be all happy about it.

This whole heart patient process has actually been rather comical to me. I laugh a lot inside my head. Some of this stuff is absolutely hilarious, and at the time, there’s no one there to laugh with me.

But don’t worry, I’ve been saving up my embarrassing patient thoughts, and I’m here to share.

All of growing up, having babies, and getting older is this continuous process of being stripped of all pride and dignity, isn’t it? You start out young and cute, strutting your stuff, and up until that first pap smear, people mostly let you keep the private things private.

Then that whole giving birth process happens. There you are, with a person on either side of you holding your legs, in all your naked glory.

For a few months, you remember that you have no pride or dignity left. You know that your husband fully witnessed what happened when you pushed that hard, how stress-ball you could become during a c-section spinal block, and just the blood and gore of it all. Sometimes I would sit there, days after, remember the pain, and accidentally find myself reliving it all and crying…..

*Shudder.*

But fast forward a few years, and I’ve sort of forgotten all of those things. Even still, my body will never be the same. I’ve birthed four children, and I’m not even sure my stomach skin is still attached to me. I’m okay with that. It was worth it, and I think I’m cleverly disguising the pooch with cute clothing.

I’ve moved on, until suddenly I became a heart patient and why are all of the techs who I have to be shirt-less in front of young males? Whyyyyyyyyyyy? Oh, the mortification.

First, it happened in the Emergency Room. At triage, my heart rate was 159. They rushed me straight back. I wasn’t even finished putting on my hospital gown, and they were hooking me up to an EKG machine. Go figure the EKG man was my age. As he placed those EKG pads all over my boob, my breastbone, and my flabby-mommy-belly, I cringed on the inside. Sigh. Thankfully, he was very kind and professional.

He came back to do several EKGs, and every single time, he would forget to cover my boobs back up. I was all covered in wires.

“Ummmm. Can you please put my bra back down?”

“Oh yeah! Sorry I keep forgettin’ that.”

But at least ER EKG man was in his 30s. I didn’t even feel all that self-conscious. I figured he’s seen worse.

That was nothing compared to the next few experiences.

First, there was the stress test. I had no idea that you have to wear an open-to-the-front hospital gown shirt for that, so I brought my ten-year-old with me.

THANKFULLY, I wore a sports bra and high-waisted pants. Yep. I was as covered up as you can possibly get for a stress test. That tech was, of course, also a male. Thankfully, he was my age or older, or he just lost his hair early. Hard to tell. Have you ever seen Gru on Despicable Me? This guy looked exactly like him.

He was extremely professional though, so I wasn’t completely horrified when I showed up for the echocardiogram (heart ultrasound) a week later and found out that Gru is in charge of those as well. Thankfully, I did not take any little boys with me to that one. Heart ultrasounds are nothing like pregnancy ultrasounds. Boobs are all flopping out there in the open, and it’s all very let’s-just-get-this-over-with.

But then there was the 24-hour Holter monitor.

By this point, I should have known to be ready for humiliation, but it was far worse than the other tests. This tech was not Gru. He looked to be all of 15-years-old. I am not even exaggerating. You see, that day I was wearing muffin-top blue jeans and had totally not thought this thing through.

“Unbutton your blouse,” he said.

“Oh. Right.”

There I was. Hot pink push-up bra, muffin-top jeans and the ol’ belly seemed 6 inches larger than usual. I shook my head at myself inwardly.

Dear women in need of jobs, could you please all go apply at your local cardiology office? Seriously, for the love of easily- embarrassed- women everywhere, for the cardiac patients like me.

When I went back to get the monitor removed the next day, it was the same guy. I very quickly started removing the pads and cords myself and fled the building…

Haaaa!!!! No, I’m kidding.

I actually DID begin removing wires myself as quickly as possibly, but he said, “Here, I’ll do that for you,” and came straight over and helped me. I was working at ending the heart-test-embarrassment as quickly as possible.

There’s no one like the medical professionals to keep us all humble, eh?

Enough about my naked embarrassment already…..onto the giveaway announcement!

First off, I want to say thank you to everyone who participated in the drawing for a free copy of VeggieTales Puppies and Guppies on DVD! And thank you to the VeggieTales company for partnering with Stories of Our Boys.

And congratulations are in order to Diana of Utah!! Hope you and your kiddos thoroughly enjoy this fun DVD!

The post My Embarrassing Heart Patient Stories and the Giveaway Winner appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.