Improvement! I fasted all day except for afternoon diet drinks (diet peach drinks and Cherry Coke Zero; 0 calories, 0 grams of carbs), and at night, when things were a tiny bit cooler, I did my 5K park walk again. This time, I stopped only once per lap, i.e., one stop per kilometer as opposed to stopping every 500 meters. So in the space of only two walk sessions, there's been 100% improvement. This doesn't reassure me that I'm curing my heart failure (I don't believe the condition is currently fixable, but I've heard of some stem-cell heart-tissue therapies that people have been working on for at least a decade); that said, if the graph of my improvement continues on this upward trend, I'm now a bit optimistic that I'll be ready in plenty of time to tackle the long walk this coming fall.
First lap: I walked from my building to the park and started the outer-loop track right away. About 600 or so meters into the lap, I had to stop and rest. In total, 500-600 meters to walk to the park + another 600 meters = about 1200 meters before needing to sit down and rest. From then on, I simply rested every lap. At each stop, I pulled out my phone and read Hillbilly Elegy (review pending) for about ten minutes. With my angina once again quiescent, I'd do the next lap. At about the 500-meter mark (roughly halfway), I'd feel the precursors of angina—a tiny bit of pressure. At around the 750-800-meter mark, the pressure would start to build, and I'd feel the urge to find a spot to stop. But I was always able to push through and do a full lap before stopping. So it's official: one stop per kilometer.
I'll probably be at this level for the next week or so. The next step: 2 km before needing to stop. Then 5K. Then a full 9-10K walk without the crutch of having park benches nearby. Once I'm up to 15K or so without having to stop, I'll know I've normalized. On my much longer walks (25-60K), I normally stop at roughly 10K intervals. I'm not that ambitious: I don't need to prove I can go 25K without stopping (although I've done that before, usually in much cooler weather... in the summertime, such a goal is hopeless).
There will be hitches along the way, I'm sure, but tonight's walk was reassuring. Not a sign that I'm combatting heart failure, but a sign that I'm beginning to return to previous performance levels.* More on this later.
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*When my mom was sick with brain cancer, one doctor made the distinction between the clinical and the medical. Medically, her skull was filling up with tumors: her X-rays and MRIs looked awful. But at a certain stage in her cancer, she was still able to talk (a bit), walk, etc. So medically (internally), her condition was bad, but clinically (how she presented visually and functionally), she wasn't quite so bad.
Didn't realize they were working on stem-cell therapies for heart disease (full disclosure: I work part-time for a cutting-edge pharma firm). Will definitely look that up.
ReplyDeleteVery good sign that the angina is on the mend, but as you said, that's the clinical and not the medical manifestation of what's going on inside your ticker.
For all we know, the actual disease could be progressing without outward symptoms (see my other post on potential remedies). Hence, continued observation and countermeasures are needed till you get a clean bill of health.
Regardless of the method, it sounds like you're on the right track to successfully finish not just this year's walk, but many more to come. Keep the faith.
How is JD's book? Worth a read?