Over the past couple of months, I have noticed a significant increase in the odd chest "flutterings" that I reported in last September's "Characters" column. At that time, a two-week monitoring showed that I occasionally had a "premature ventricular contraction" (PVC), which prompted a skipped beat, and there were a few runs of rapid heart beats.
My doctor recommended that I reduce the intake of stimulants and, for example, stop drinking coffee that hadn't been decaffeinated. I complied, limiting myself to a swallow or two or three of what was left over after using a French press to make a cup for my wife each morning. As I reported last September, I found that I could easily live with this.
However, the recent increase of flutterings prompted me to consult my doctor again the last week of May. She listened to my chest and detected three skipped beats within a single minute, and her technician's EKG graph recorded two skipped beats. No runs of rapid beats were detected, and my own sense is that the occurrence of these has not increased.
I have made a follow-up appointment with a cardiologist, whom I've seen before for significant chest pains, but with no apparent cardiac cause in evidence. Even though I have made, and will keep, this appointment, all of this has got me thinking.
As I lay abed in the still early hours Monday, observing the beat of my heart and feeling thankful for my life, I realized that my heart has beaten many, many times in my 72 and a half years. How many times? I wondered.
My heart rate is in line with the National Institutes of Health, in the range 60-100 beats per minute (for children 10 years and older, and for adults, including seniors). (For well-trained athletes, it's 40-60 beats per minute.)
Everyone's heart does a great deal of work in one's lifetime. So you'd think that an older person's heart, even if the person's heart is in good health, might be tiring of all the work and may be suffering naturally from the wear and tear.
Going by the heart rate recorded at my doctor's appointments, my average resting rate seems to be around 70 beats per minute, or a little higher. Whatever your rate is, you can calculate the approximate number of your total heart beats by multiplying your average resting heart rate times 60 minutes per hour, times 24 hours per day, times 365 days per year (not counting leap years), times the number of years you have lived (ignoring that your heart has beaten faster many times when you weren't at rest, and that your resting heart rate before age 10 was almost certainly higher).
In my case, that's 70 beats per minute x 60 x 24 x 365 x 72, not counting leap years and the five+ months I've lived beyond my 72nd birthday, nor counting all the times that my heart rate was higher than when I was at rest. My calculator tells me (if I keyed everything in right) that my heart has beaten at least 2,649,024,000 times so far – a very conservative number, given all the things I've not factored in.
That's well over two and a half billion times. I think that's a job well done. And I'm steadying my mind with that reflection, to adjust myself for the reality that there's a limit to what medical or pharmaceutical intervention can do for an older person. I'll continue eating healthily, walking a fast mile+ almost every day, and using the weight machines and swimming pool at the gym three days a week, as well as going to bed early.
| Copyright © 2015 by Morris Dean |
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