Family Update 7/28/07
July 28, 2007
Sorry for the dearth of posts lately, I seem to have picked up a nasty cold while in Anaheim for the Showstopper National Dance Competition. Actually, the whole family got minor colds except for me who got the doozy. We are talking serious chest and head congestion with a running nose and wicked cough. Yesterday, the right ear blocked up.
Now, I don’t get sick very often. In fact, it’s been almost 15 years since I have missed a day at work from sickness. The ear blocking is a good thing as it usually means the cold is on the way out for me. I do feel better than the last few days of last week, but I need to stop coughing at night so as to get some sleep – maybe tonight.
A Happy Birthday to my sister Kelly who turned 42 yesterday! I believe she is out and about in Michigan researching locals for our next family reunion up there next Summer. We are rooting for her to find some good places to enjoy each others company.
My computer also took a nose dive last week. After booting into Windows, it would just simply hang. About 1 time out of ten, it would come up with some errors but I could do most things. Finally on Friday, it just refused to come up. I got lucky this time as a repair attempt with my Windows installation CD was able to fix the problem. Still, I hate having to mess with it.
Suzanne finally finished with the our recent Alaska Cruise images. I have uploaded them here at Mr Papa’s World but we still need to add the titles and description of the images. That should be forthcoming in the next day or two. I will post when they are completely ready, but feel free to check them out in the gallery now if you desire.
Well, around the time of the Showstopper National Dance Competition, I finally pulled the trigger and bought new equipment for my theater room. We got a new HDTV, a Blu-Ray Hi Def DVD player, a new A/V Receiver and a DirecTV HD DVR. I will do a post in the next few days on the equipment specifics and why I upgraded. We had someone come over today and look at our old HDTV, so hopefully we will get that sold soon to offset some of the cost.
Just a couple more weeks of Summer for the kids before they head off back to school. I think the official date is Aug 13th. Seems a bit odd to already picking up school supplies for them, but with the traveling we did this Summer, it just flew by. Sean moves into Middle School so he is excited. They just got their standard test scores back from last year and continue to excel. Overall, they were both in the 90th percentile in Arizona. Sean topped out at 99 percentile in Math and Savannah at 95 in Reading.
I received another whole bunch of genealogy updates from John Butler on Suzanne’s side of the family. He has provided a lot of good info on some of her family members. I continue to be negligent in my genealogy research. I have a bunch of data to input, I just need to find the time. Maybe with all of our family vacations out of the way (unfortunately), I can get to them here in the next few weeks.
We watched our first Blu-Ray movie tonight on the new system. It was Fly Boys and looked absolutely stunning. The story and the movie were good too. Definitely worth a watch.
Okay, off to cook dinner…
More Heart Tests
April 25, 2007
Well, the good news came back today… My heart is completely healthy…
As detailed in previous posts, there is some heart disease that runs in my family. Both my Grandfather and Father passed away from heart attacks. My Dad was only 47. As I am not too far away from that at 43, I am quite conscious of the risk factors.
Last December, I had a Heart Save CT Scan done to check the amount of plaque in my heart. The results came back very positive, with a very minimal score.
A couple of months back, I began to experience some chest pains. I hesitate to say chest pains because that over dramatizes what was going on. It was really a tightness or heaviness in the chest area. At no time was there any pain. This was accompanied by quite dramatic gas, burping, belching, etc…
Being one to be quite aware of what I am most likely facing at some point in my life, I dutifully went to the doctor with my symptoms. He didn’t believe it had anything to do with my heart, but never the less ran some blood tests and even did an ECG to check my heart. Everything came back positive. He had me get on a Prilosec OTC regimen to see if it was acid related. That medicine seemed to have no effect.
At my urging, he referred me to a Cardiologist just to see if he was missing something. At my first visit with him, his instinct and judgment, based on data, was that whatever the issue was, it most likely was not related to my heart. After some consultation with me, we decided to do a treadmill stress test, just to be sure. I had done one of those about ten years ago, again just to check out my condition and passed with flying colors.
I again passed this stress test but my “condition” had not really improved. We talked about how deterministic this particular stress test was and decided, given my family history, to go a bit more in depth. This meant a nuclear stress test. Oooohhh… what a fancy term, nuclear stress test.
Well, I had that test done last week. What it really means, is that they injected me with a small dose radioactive substance to measure my blood flow and heart pumping performance. After injection, they took a whole bunch of pictures of my heart and chest area at rest to get a baseline. Then, I again got back on the treadmill and got my heart rate way up high. They immediately took another series of images to see if there was any blood flow blockages or other issues. These tests were a pain in the ass, as they took almost 3 hours with most of the time sitting in a waiting room.
Anyways, I got my test results today. You always have to wonder when the doctor says “Let’s start with the good news…”. However, the good news was all that there was. The test were very conclusive that there was nothing wrong with my heart. I passed the test with flying colors again. According to the Cardiologist, there is no signs whatsoever of coronary heart disease. In fact, he was quite impressed with how I did on all the stress tests. Of course, these tests are not all inclusive and other issues could be hidden.
His best guess (not sure that’s the right term 
) as to my problem is something acid reflux related. He was a bit surprised when I told him that I had take Prilosec OTC with minimal benefit. It’s back to the primary care physician to plot the next course on this issue.
The bottom line is that my proactive heart assessments keep coming back positive. This is great news given my family history. I will continue to be aggressive in monitoring my heart health as I age. My Cardiologist did mention that they have a brand new imaging system coming online in the next month or so that will revolutionize how they can look at potential future heart issues. We will get back together in 6 months or so and evaluate whether we want to do one of those tests.
With a bit of afterthought, I must be getting old. I now have a primary care physician, a Rheumatologist, a Cardiologist, and an Ophthalmologist. Dang, getting old sucks. I have an appointment with my Ophthalmologist at the end of May, where I expect to start wearing glasses. Where did the times go…. 
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