ECG results

After my 192 HR reading last week, I have been more than a little nervous about the return of my Atrial Flutter. My ride on Thursday last week was sound - a short sharp blast with no ill-effects and confidence in my heart's health grew. On Saturday, the story was a little different - I made a really good start and despite really giving it beans on numerous occasions, my HR reacted completely normally. Towards the end of the ride though, I started feeling a bit dizzy, my HR started dropping on efforts and I became convinced once again the the Flutter had returned. It's amazing how when you suspect you have something wrong with you, you get more and more symptoms that prove your self-diagnosis is entirely accurate. Today when doing my forth-road-bridge job of tidying the kids toys away, I stood up quickly and found myself swooning into the nearest wall. Flutter had certainly returned!

So, with grim acceptance of my fluttering fate, I entered Dr Lee's room and explained what had been going on. He listened to my heart - seemed fine. Then the sticky pads and wires were applied to my chest, back and legs and he fired the ECG up. He took a quick look at the machine and then went behind the curtain. I could hear him scribbling furiously - he doesn't normally do that. Something is definitely wrong. A minute or two later the ECG machine spewed out a little bit of paper and I learned, to my surprise and delight, that I was absolutely fine! Ha! Sinus Rhythm reigns!

I'm going to have a 48 hour ECG, just to make sure that my heart isn't flipping in and out of flutter but I can carry on as normal.

The fact that I'm not going to need an operation and warfarin and INR checking and all that stuff is fantastic news. Suddenly I feel really well and healthy again - not a swoon in sight ;-)
I'm also very happy to have the opportunity to cycle in Annecy. Bourg D'Oisans with a heart problem was frustrating so it would be good to have a crack at some more cols. However, I wonder if this is a really selfish of me. My plan is to do the 40km time trial - about 90 mins? I would also like to do a couple of other routes - the first, which I posted last time, a 30 miler, which should take a couple of hours. This is the second route I fancy: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/kml/episode.kml?episodePkValues=3093597 - about 40 miles so probably a 2.5-3 hour ride. That's it for the week - worst case scenario, 7 hours away from the family. I always like to ride at the crack of dawn so that it doesn't interrupt family time too much - 6am wake up and out by 6.30am.

Having said all that, my first priority for this holiday is to have some lovely family time - included in that is some cycling around the lake with the children. Our trip to the Manchester Skyride was great - my daughter said it was the best day of her life. We cycled alongside each other and she said, "I love you, Mummy" - magical & priceless.
Family riding is best suited to the MTB. The MTB has fat, fat, fat tyres, like tractor tyres - perhaps if I swapped them for something a little slicker, I could take the MTB and do my solo rides on that (although I suspect I just wouldn't have the desire to ride those routes on my MTB). On the other hand, judging by the photographs I've found on the internet, the cycle path's surface looks wonderfully smooth and my road bike would be fine on it. But, I'd be a bit more worried about leaving my road bike locked up if we were to cycle into Annecy for lunch or whatever. I started writing this trying to justify taking the road bike but I'm starting to feel that the MTB makes more sense? It's absolutely marvellous that I have the choice; four hours ago I was certain that I wouldn't be able to ride up hills at all.