Be Excellent To Each Other

Hi. Does anyone know of someone who has a 'cardiac event'? Not an arrest, an 'event'. Necessitating a heart monitor be attached for a few days, and staying away from all computers and stuff so as not to knacker up the results. Of whether or not your heart is failing and stuff.

Please - serious replies only.

My gran has had to have one of these fitted a few times - usually a 24 (or was it 48) hour thing. They attach sticky pads all over you and you have a little monitor fitted.

Hope everything's OK, old chap.

Was there anything in particular that you needed to know? I could certainly ask her if there was anything you queried.

Um... is is just a generic term used to mean 'Yeah, something up with your heart, oh no!'? And... how useful was the heart monitor in the case of Gran, Mimi? Did it help The Doctors to find out what was up, or was it just a useless added burden?

I don't really know what I'm asking about in relation to it, I just need to ask 'Er, anyone have anything useful to say about <x>, anything at all'. So, thank-you.

Well, Nan had one fitted because she was feeling dizzy and faint - having one fitted can help to determine whether someone is feeling tight in teh chest because of an underlying heart problem or just because they are overdoing it - also it helps to see at what time of teh ay the stress might be being caused - the time of getting up being the most common, I think.

I have actually had to have a 24 hour heart trace myself when I was admitted to hospital for exhaustion and my heart was jumping all over the place (but this was all carried out in the hospital, not one of the ones where you try and live a normal day, but without standing near huge magnets and the like.

A lot of the time it is just a precaution, but small signs on that can pick up on things that you just have to take care of. In both mine and my gran's cases our hearts were fine - a lot of the time it is just used to rule out a problem with the patterns of your heart.

I hope whatever it is goes OK, but don't panic about it too much, if it's you that's having one fitted, as that won't help at all. If it were anything immediately serious they'd be having you in on a static heart tracing monitor thingy.

Think of it as any other kind test like a blood/urine type test for now.

I wore one for a day a month or so ago - I had a few days where my heart was at a resting rate of 120, due to an inflammatory condition. Treating the condition lowered my rest rate back to it's normal 75, I think they were just checking the heart wasn't taking damage from being at an increased rate for a sustained period.

I had a few tests and a scan once upon a time, as I was having palpatations. Most of these sorts of things turn out to be nothing serious (hopefully!). Mine was just stress, I think, though that was hardly helped by having to go on a Summer holiday with three large squares shaved out of my chest from where they had to stick the electrodes!

I know someone who had to have a device that gave him a small electric shock at certain intervals and would then take a heart reading. Again this was due to an "event".

He was actually presenting a radio show every afternoon and the regular shock kept him on his toes.

Thank-you for the info, folks. Particularly Craster and Curiosity (no offence meant elsewhere...), that's encouraged me somewhat. For the record - it's not me. I'm infuriatingly tenacious, sorry.