Nuclear Stress Test, Friday May 25th

Hi everyone:

I go in under the knife on Tuesday, May 29th for my implant surgery. Friday was a pain in the a@@. I was told Thursday that the cardiologist saw an abnormal Q wave on my EKG, so they want me to have a stress test with radioactive contrast or a Nuclear Stress Test. The protocol calls for me to raise my heart rate above 140 beats per minute. I hit the gym three, four times a week and do 5 miles on the tread mill with no problems at my gym. They had me jogging at 5.5 mph with a 15 per cent grade and I'm jogging along with a 126 beats per minute rate and I can watch the EKG which is running right next to me. I've ran EKG's when I worked in Cardiac Research years ago and I'm commenting to the EKG tech, so where are all those abnormal Q waves. I don't see a one. He tells me that they get Nuclear Stress tests ordered on all diabetics from this one Anesthesiologist who will be on my surgery team. They decided to run the test with a 126 bpm because I'm not going to higher, so the radiology tech pushed the radioactive material into me and I took the test and had the scan. Wasted a whole morning missing work having a totally useless test because doctors have to practice defensive medicine. Wonder what my insurance costs would be if the sue crazy world took a year off. I did find out that my test showed no evidence of infarcts in my heart or clogged arteries or any evidence what so ever of heart desease. I test at 160 % higher than my age group and have less than a 5 % chance of having significant cardiovascular desease or dying from it. Not too bad for an old guy with 22 years of Type 1 diabetes. Anyway, I'm cleared to go Tuesday morning and the stress test shows that I keep myself in good physical condition for being 52 years old. I'm alergic to morphine since my last surgery, so I wonder what I'll get for pain meds following surgery. I've read dojenncl post and I wonder if I'll be swollen and sore following surgery like he was. I've also settled on having the AMS 700 Ultrex implant. The wife and kids are at a wedding all this weekend. I'm keeping busy getting all of my honey-do''s done before I'm too sore to do much of anything for awhile.