ANGINA - Fun with my Echo-Cardiogram

I am NOT a medical person, so my blog entries are only from a ‘normal patient’s’ point of view . . .
This is about how Ultra-sound is used to see ‘real-time’ heart activity. Medics use it to check the ‘structure and movement’ of the patient’s heart muscle. [http://www.heartsite.com/html/echocardiogram.html & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echocardiography ].

I had one yesterday at Homerton Hospital [http://www.homerton.nhs.uk/ ]. You lie on a comfy bed for a half-hour while the cardiologist uses a probe (a small thing with a stethescope-type end) to look at the heart from outside the rib-cage; they take readings from various points on the patient’s chest and back, and it’s all stored on the hard-disk drive as a ‘film’. We had a great time, chatting about all sorts of things (heart ‘procedures’, education in our respective home countries, teenagers’ behaviour in various places we’d lived, etc, etc.). After what seemed like no time at all, he said ‘Sit up, it’s all done’. He showed me clips of the moving film; it looked like a pulsating bit of tissue, back and forth, back and forth, symmetrical valves opening and shutting in perfect syncopation. The Echo-CG doesn't just look at the outside of the heart, it gives pictures from half-way through, like a sliced-open view. How cool is that !!

The cardiologist explained that from his tests he could say that I had “ . . . come to the hospital in time.” One of the tests I’d had early-on was for a particular ‘protein marker’ in the blood, which if it had been there would have shown that I’d previously had a heart attack (http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2001/11/troponin1101.html ). That protein wasn’t found, so they concluded that I’d not yet had a heart attack (heart attacks can damage the heart, which is a muscle and therefore can be damaged, just like any other). So I had no apparent tissue or nerve damage from that possible cause; the various valves and other bits were in good working order.

I am very confident now that I’ll be able to get on with my cardiac rehabilitation, which I started this week. Cadiac Rehab is exercise and diet and ‘lifestyle advice’, in my case at the local Sports centre [http://www.aquaterra.org/islington/Sobell/ ], and it’s paid for by the NHS. I’ll try and generate a new blog post on the rehab. It is hard work, but it is a lot of fun (something to do with the instructors).