Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

The Lord your God has blessed you in all the work of your hands. He has watched over your journey through this vast wilderness. These forty years the Lord your God has been with you, and you have not lacked anything.

• Deuteronomy 2:7

For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands.

• 2 Corinthians 5:1

I had trouble handling the heat this past summer, at least by the time this post comes out, summer will be past tense, and maybe the hot days will not be so hot.

It got so bad that I had an additional diabetic medicine added and I was scheduled for a stress test, echocardiogram, and lab work.  All of that happened at the same time last Friday, as of writing this.  I awoke at 4:30am, to maximize my stress, I suppose.  I think I was second on their schedule.  Being in advanced years, I take the nuclear stress test, and that has changed since the last time I took it.  The nuclear medicine dilates the vessels so that to maintain the blood flow, the heart must pump harder, not necessarily faster.  But while that was done, they did the echocardiogram.  I enjoy that test until the last thing where they usually go in your gut and point the probe straight up to the heart.  The problem is there is a lot of me that must be shoved out of the way, but this time the technician found a spot along my neck and took those images from above the heart.  It was wonderful!  I walked over three miles, according to my pedometer, and I sat instead of walking the treadmill.  Funny, they worry you are too old to walk, but they only offer a wheelchair for the last couple hundred feet.

But the results came back within a couple of hours.  The primary care physician’s nurse practitioner said that there was something bad wrong and the cardiologist had to talk to me immediately.  Of course, she said that as the office was about to close, but I caught the appointment person before she left, and she thought nothing of it.  My results were on her desk and there was no flag.  So I had a little concern over the weekend.

Monday afternoon a different appointment person at the cardiologist called.  A very short message, “You have an appointment at eleven tomorrow morning to discuss what needs to be done after your stress test was reviewed.  The doctors will be there waiting.”  Funny, she never asked if I had that hour free.  At this point, I got nervous, and I did what Jesus told us not to do, I worried.  With my wife passed, I had no one to give me a hug.  The word “doctors” sounded like my cardiologist and then the doctor that would do the next procedure.  What could have changed over the weekend?

The nurse was late in doing my EKG, and my cardiologist came in as she walked out.  He asked me what happened with the stress test from five years ago.  I replied, “There was a strange shadow on the images.  You could not figure out what it was and if it was a blockage, you needed to fix it.  But the doctor who did the heart catheterization found no need for concern, other than my heart is enlarged, meaning it has been pumping harder than it normally should.”

He smiled and said that my blood pressures looked great, and those being high usually leads to heart deterioration.  He said my symptoms of being too hot did not sound like cardio issues at all.  The deterioration was slightly worse, but within the accuracy parameters of the equipment possibly the same after five years.  He said I was stronger now than I had been five years ago, and if I call him with chest pain, palpitations, or shortness of breath, we’ll skip the preliminaries and go straight to the heart catheterization.  But he was also going to flag my file to never do a stress test again.  With the shadow that no one can explain, my results would be flagged every time.  And I had too much to do to go to the hospital for another heart procedure.

So, it was all in God’s hands from the beginning, and I am fine.

Worrying got me nowhere, but praying does wonders.

And praying can have a placebo effect.  I said I had no one to hug me, but God had me in a big bear hug the entire time.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.