Happy Holidays!

I'm not likely to get online much tomorrow, so I wanted to just stop in today and post a short note to say Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all of you who read this. I hope you have a great holiday and a very happy New Year! I'll be back in January to write about the efforts Jim and I will be making to work on our weight together.

Thanks for reading!

First Stress Over, Tuesday Off to a Great Start!

I had my stress test - and all is well! My heart looked great, and there isn't any abnormality or disease to be making the palpitations happen. Yay!

I tell you what, I knew I was worried about this, but I didn't quite realize how worried I was until the worry left. I feel so relieved now!

So now I'm preparing for my interview, but I think it may be just the way I figured - the stress test went well, and I'm so happy and relieved that I'm not at all worried about the interview. I think I'm prepared for it. If I get it, great, if I don't, it's not a big deal - I'm happy enough where I am. It's not my dream job, but the other job isn't either. So I'm fine either way.

It's nice to be able to go into the interview being all zen about it. :)

Really I just want my vacation to start now! I want to go home, hug Jim and celebrate being healthy. Yay! No heart disease!

The Tuesday from Hell...or Not?

Two pretty important things are happening tomorrow, and the first one is probably going to set the tone for the entire rest of the day.

The first thing, of course, is my stress test. I've tried not to worry about it, but I can't quite help it - I just am so hoping that nothing is wrong to cause these PVCs! I have no idea if I'll find out tomorrow morning or not, but if it seems to go well, it will probably put me in the right frame of mind to have a really good rest of the day. If it doesn't go well, though, the opposite is bound to happen. So here's hoping for a good result.

The second thing is an interview for a different job in my company. I've been in my current job for almost five years, and while there have been times when I've enjoyed it, I've never really loved it, and there have been a lot of times recently when I've downright hated it. So when another position came up that seemed like it might be better suited to me, I applied for it. Having the interview a mere few hours after my stress test, however, may have been foolish. Hopefully that stress test will go so well that I'll be in a great mood and sail through that interview. We'll see!

And then we have our office holiday lunch at Noon, which thankfully we're having catered, so I didn't have to cook anything. And it's a full moon. And the winter solstice. And my period is due. Fun! :D

We'll be a weight loss team. A weight loss machine!

Jim and I were eating too much this weekend, and bemoaning the sizes of our respective bellies, and he said when I was ready to lose mine, he was ready to join me. To which I responded,

"In January. I want some Christmas cookies, goddamn it!"

Hee.

So yes, it's true. I've failed spectacularly at this whole dieting thing on my own, but if Jim is doing it with me, I have a shot at succeeding, I think. So yes, I'll be making cookies over the next week and a half, and I'll enjoy eating them. But once January gets here, it's back on my best behavior, with the help and company of the man I love.

I also made a decision. I had thought about joining Weight Watchers online, or else maybe Jillian Michael's online weight loss plan, but after doing some research, I realized that they don't offer anything that I can't get at Spark People for free, so that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to start fresh there, track my food, track my exercise, and watch my weight go down.

I'm not exercising right now, by the way. I really didn't feel comfortable going to the gym and pushing myself on the elliptical before I know if there is actually anything behind these heart flutters. Hopefully I'll know for sure on Tuesday that my heart is as healthy as the heart of a 41 year old fat woman can be, and then I can get back to it. For now, I drive straight home after work (giving my heart a work out anyway, because driving in all the snow we've been getting is not fun), put on my pajamas and relax. I can't say I'm too sorry about it, either. :)

Heart Monitor Results Are...Sort of In?

I called my doctor's office a few minutes ago, to see if they had the results from the heart monitor thing yet. I didn't talk to the doctor herself - I think the woman on the phone was a nurse? I'm not sure. Maybe not, since she didn't know what some of the words in the report meant. Anyway, she said that they did get the results, and they're scheduling me for a stress test next week.

Okay, I don't really know what any of this means, big picture wise, but here is what she said. My heart is in sinus rhythm, which is good. My average heart rate was 85, which for me is about normal, I think (it's almost always in the 80s when I take it, even years ago when I was younger and much thinner). But there were "frequent PVCs," and they want me to take a stress test, I think to find out if there is a cardiac disease looming, or if the PVCs are just a normal thing that happen sometimes.

And here is where I admit that I totally had to look up the term PVC, and it stands for Premature Ventricular Contraction. Basically, it's exactly what it felt like - my heart sometimes just beats a second time sooner than it should.

It's funny - I wasn't really worried about this at all before. I even forgot to call on Friday to see if they had my results. But now? I'm kind of worried. This isn't fun.

So that's where we are. I have to be at the hospital on Tuesday at 6:45 a.m., which is pretty torturous, since it means I'll have to be up at around 5:00. And I have to walk on a treadmill while electrodes are stuck to my skin. But we'll see what it says. I haven't worked out in a couple of weeks (the gym has been closed because the trainer had surgery, and I've been bad and haven't worked out at home), but when I was still going, my heart never felt weird when working out at all. It doesn't even flutter there, usually. So we'll see.

Oh, and it's only fluttered maybe 1-4 times a day for the last four days. It's been nice, having the flutters slow down and thinking that they may be going away. Now here's hoping that it really is all nothing, and that the stress test will prove that. Because while the web page I read to find out about PVCs said in most cases they meant nothing, it also used the term "sudden death" a few times, and I don't like that term at all. So we're hoping for nothing being wrong, obviously.

Heart Monitor

I went yesterday afternoon and had the monitor put on. I was questioning whether or not I should bother, because of course the very day I was scheduled to do it, my heart only fluttered a few times all morning, and those times were very slight - much less forceful than they had been even the day before.

But of course it was a good thing I went through with it, because my heart fluttered quite a few times last evening and this morning, so it should have recorded a good number of instances.

Having it put on went pretty quickly and easily - at least as much as any medical appointment can. The woman doing it just stuck five electrodes onto me - one on each side, at about the shoulder end of my clavicle, one on each ribcage, under my breasts, and one between my breasts. Then she put tape over the electrodes, to help keep them in place. Simple, easy, and I drove back to work with wires running from my chest to the small monitor, which I tucked into my pocket.

After wearing it for 24 hours, Jim helped me take it off this afternoon, and I'm glad he was here to do it, because taking all that off was fairly painful - like ripping off a Band-Aid that is really stuck on well, for four of them, but the one between my breasts hurt so much more than that! Ouch. But they came off, and now I'm wire free.

I'll take it back on Monday to the doctor's office, and then I'll get results whenever they're ready - I think she said it can take about a week. So I'll let you all know what I find out whenever I hear from them.

I'm a little worried about it, of course, because anything abnormal with the heart is just scary. But I'm not too worried. I'm not having any shortness of breath, no dizziness, no chest pain - just the flutters. I'll just be very happy and grateful if (when) I find out that it's nothing to worry about.

For now, though, I'm going to enjoy the rest of the weekend with Jim. He's off, after working almost non-stop for a couple of weeks, and I had been missing him something awful. But now he's here, and we put up most of the Christmas decorations tonight, and it just looks so nice in here now. So I'll have a nice, wire free rest of the weekend. :)

Weighing In Once Again!

I weighed myself this morning, and I lost a tiny bit more, yay! I'm at 220.5 today. :) That's only a 3/4 pound loss since the last time I weighed in (on October 29th), but it's a 1 1/2 pound loss since Monday, so I'm still happy with myself. November seems to have been a total waste, though. I can't do that with anymore months! Time is running out.

Anyway, I'm happy with this loss. I hope to be down to about 218 by next Friday, which by the way happens to be the 10th - exactly nine months before my wedding! If I'm at 218 on Friday, I'll have nine months left to lose either 83 or 78 pounds, depending on what final weight I end up settling on (135 or 140). It's definitely something that can be done, but there isn't any wiggle room for lost months anymore!

This afternoon I go to get the halter monitor on. I have to get it at 2:30, and I'll be wearing it for 24 hours. Then hopefully next week I'll have some answers as to what the heck is going on!