If you're the one to hold it last.....

Cardiac rehab in the gym continues. Saw one extremely elderly fellow who has nonrevascularizable coronary disease, that is his docs couldn't open up his blood vessels by angioplasty or stenting. So our job is to let him walk on the treadmill, use the other exercise equipment, and hope that nothing bad happens while he's here. It's a game of medical wonder ball. Of course all of medicine is like that. You hope you aren't left holding the ball when the music stops. But sometimes you are.

Just as an aside, I'm going to share a little medical secret: DOCTORS CAN'T FORETELL THE FUTURE. Any doctor who tells you he or she can should prompt you to do something very quickly--Find another doctor. The best we can do is analyze what your risks for a particular problem are and based on that assessment, make a very general prediction as to which broad group of similar patients you seem to fit into. Since we know (in a very general way) what the so called "natural history" of many diseases are, some prediction can be made as to what you might expect will happen to you. Notice all the hedging? It's there by design. We get fooled all of the time.

Over the years I often chuckled to myself when someone having a heart attack would ask, " How can this be happening? I just had a normal checkup (or a normal stress test) and my doctor said I would live to be 100 ." The doctor should have been flogged. Pure hubris. But many of us never learn.

Anyway, one of the other clients (we don't call them patients in the gym) had chest pain on the way up the stairs to the rehab area. Called 911 for him and sent him to the E.R. The nurse sent another client to her doc for recurrent episodes of chest pain while exercising. Geez-this sounds like I'm still working. The fact of the matter is, this was just a busy day. Most of the time things are much more relaxed.

Went home and made dinner for myself and Her. I've been doing a fair amount of cooking since I cut back my hours which is the preferred method of refering to it. Today I tried citrus marinated mahi-mahi, Cajun spiced beans and rice (my own concoction), and a green veggie. Usually She's a little tentative about my experiments in the kitchen. Today I was nicely complimented on my efforts.

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