Stop draggin' my heart around

Almost exactly a year ago, I was taking advantage of my use-'em-or-lose-'em vacation days to get some doctor appointments out of the way. My internist and his PA heard a heart murmer that they hadn't heard the previous year, which prompted an echocardiogram and two attempted appointments for cardio stress tests. The scheduling nurse couldn't pull her head out of her... Cosmopolitan long enough to get it right, and I ran out of vacation days. I figured I'd get it rescheduled after the first of the year, but then things got busy and I never bothered. If hitting 190 beats per minute on my weekend bike rides hadn't given me a massive coronary, how bad could it be?

I went for my annual physical today, and the murmer's still there. The doctor is perplexed, because the echocardiogram didn't show anything to suggest where the gooshing noise is coming from. And he wants to know where the gooshing noise is coming from.

So now, I get to add a cardiologist to my growing collection of specialists and hope that he'll find nothing worth cracking a sternum over. I prefer to keep my medical issues in the realm of abrasions, contusions, and dislocations. You know: stuff you get from bike crashes.

The up side is that my labs came back good, all my boy parts passed muster, my neck and back haven't flared up since earlier this summer, and I have a new pair of bifocals that I can actually see through without giving myself a headache. It's a pretty good place to be, heading into Thanksgiving week.