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Showing posts from February 7, 2010

Turn on your Heart Light

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If you were reading Troubles back in 2008, you may remember that I had a procedure to determine whether or not I should get a defibrillator placed. The results indicated that they were able to get my heart out of rhythm and that a defibrillator was recommended. After about 3 months of mulling it over and not being able to decide, I realized my indecision was stemming from my resistance to the idea. I did not get the defibrillator. The reason I had this test performed in the first place was that I had had a series of results from previous, less invasive studies which were troubling to my cardiologist. These studies included a stress test and multiple Echocardiograms. An Echocardiogram is an ultrasound of the heart that helps determine your ejection fraction , which is basically a measure of heart function. More specifically: ejection fraction (Ef) is the fraction of blood pumped out of a ventricle with each heart beat - Wikipedia Healthy people generally have EFs of around 50-75%