Written by As part of the biennial free medical checkup provided by my employer, I had a good time getting all the attention (and getting vials-full of blood sucked out of my body) from the lady doctors that checked me up(and shamelessly shared their private clinic visiting cards for ‘ further follow-ups’, at a cost, of course) last Saturday morning. And the reports are in this morning. In the summary pages, it mentions two ominous-sounding things:
- Borderline high LDL
- Sinus Bradycardia
Since I know what LDL is, I figured I need to cut down on my saturated fats (primarily from mother-in-law made gound-ke-ladd) and have more meals replaced with oats! And that, sadly, means no samosas from the canteen. And thankfully, my number of 117 is not so far off from the healthy upper limit of 100. I know people who have had numbers above 300!
What really scared the hell out of me was the Sinus Bradycardia bit! I looked up the net and found that they were referring to a slow heart rate, and I could link that up to the comment one of the investigators (was it during the 2-D echo?) had made mentioning that I have a low heart rate. I had, at that time, commented that ‘I am an athlete’ and that settled the matter with the investigator commenting, “We rarely get to see the heart of an athlete. We get people to whom we need to prescribe walking for 30 mins every day!”.
Further looking at the Wikipedia article revealed that it is typical of all athletes to have a slower heart rate since each beat of the heart is powerful enough to pump the right amount of oxygenated blood to the rest of the body. In fact, super athletes like Lance Armstrong have a resting heart rate of just 42 beats!!! Mine is 63 and a long way (and lots of road running, cycling and swimming sessions) away from that benchmark! Amen!
