Posted on 11/15/2019 7:49:01 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
The stories make headlines and strike fear in the hearts of runners who read them. Athletes—often young and seemingly healthy—die suddenly at races, during training runs, or in the off hours between them.
Often, the cause is sudden cardiac arrest, which occurs when the heart stops beating. It’s a short-circuit in the electrical impulses that govern your heartbeat. That’s different from a heart attack, typically caused by a blood clot physically blocking blood flow through an artery, though the two can be linked.
According to the latest American Heart Association statistics, sudden cardiac arrest isn’t common among runners—about 0.54 per 100,000 participants in half marathons and marathons experienced it. But it’s often deadly, killing 70 percent of those runners. That’s slightly better than the 90 percent overall mortality rate for people who experience sudden cardiac arrest outside a hospital.
Because so many people don’t live to talk about it, doctors can’t exactly say how often they have symptoms beforehand, said Matthew Martinez, M.D., a cardiologist at the Lehigh Valley Health Network and chair of the American College of Cardiology’s sports and exercise cardiology section. A recent research review published in CMAJ, however, suggests about 29 percent of those who died had some signs.
Those who survived can shed even more light on what occurred in the days and weeks beforehand—as well as what life is like on the other side. Here, five of their stories.
(Excerpt) Read more at runnersworld.com ...
Echocardiograms have become very detailed and relieving in the last couple of years. Hopefully they will become cheap enough to where you can get them at an annual physical.
“... die suddenly at races, during training runs, or in the off hours between them.”
More great journalism. Awesome.
I always think of Pete Maravich:
Maravich had flown out from his home in Louisiana to tape a segment for Dobson’s radio show that aired later that day. Dobson has said that Maravich’s last words, less than a minute before he died, were “I feel great. I just feel great.” An autopsy revealed the cause of death to be a rare congenital defect; he had been born with a missing left coronary artery, a vessel that supplies blood to the muscle fibers of the heart. His right coronary artery was grossly enlarged and had been compensating for the defect.
They say that it was a miracle he lived as long as he did.
“ I used to smoke marijuana. But I’ll tell you something: I would only smoke it in the late evening. Oh, occasionally the early evening, but usually the late evening – or the mid-evening. Just the early evening, midevening and late evening. Occasionally, early afternoon, early midafternoon, or perhaps the late-midafternoon. Oh, sometimes the early-mid-late-early morning. . . . But never at dusk.”
Steve Martin
A classic. Nobody told stories like Richard Pryor could.
Ask Jim fixx how smart running is
When I think of running, I think of Jim Fixx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Fixx
Our local doctor related a story to me recently about working the ER in the larger neighboring town. There was a bicycle race in town one hot summer and an early 30’s man was brought in with what was suspected to be heat stroke. All his companions were in their 50’s & 60’s. Even though they were all cardiologists, none suspected cardiac arrest because he was the youngest and most fit of them all, so were shocked when that turned out to be the case.
My friend Pim Van Lommel is a cardiologist in Denmark. When he became a cardiologist they didn’t have CPR or resuscitation paddles.
In the 1990’s he noticed that that the patients he brought back to life with the new technology were telling him about life after death.
So he did a very professional study, interviewing many resuscitated patients and found that about 15% had the after death experience that they fully remembered.
His research was so good it was published in the medical journal Lancet in 2001.
Lancet VOLUME 358, ISSUE 9298, P2039-2045, DECEMBER 15, 2001
Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest: a prospective study in the Netherlands
Dr Pim van Lommel, MD
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673601071008/fulltext
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My first death experience was full a blown visit to Heaven in 1988. It was very life changing. I never fully returned to my body thus it gave me unusual abilities.
I have since found that through prayer and meditation I can have the same experience.
Since then I have spent 25+ years studying consciousness and the neuroscience of how it interacts with the physical body.
Karelia Pro costs $100 to buy but you must sign up for the $15/month plan to have a cardiologist review the readings. The author of this article, Dr. Pearson, says the instrument is good for monitoring Afib and assessing palpitations, premature ventricular contractions, tachycardia, and other problems.
Skeptical Cardiologist: Do Mobile Heart-Monitoring Devices Work?
OMRON makes excellent blood pressure monitors. Last year they introduced a combination BP monitor + EKG, the first to measure for both high blood pressure and atrial fibrillation, two different risk factors for stroke.
Here’s a review of portable ECG instruments from 2018 (already getting out of date) that has good information. The author points out “ Many handheld ECG devices give only limited information as compared to conventional 12‐lead ECGs. Hence, concerns about their accuracy and reliability need to be examined. As information obtained by ECG invariably needs to be interpreted along with clinical inputs, it is debated if out‐of‐hospital use will really be beneficial.”
Portable out‐of‐hospital electrocardiography: A review of current technologies, by Agam Bansal, MBBS and Rajnish Joshi, MD, MPH, PhD, April 2018, Journal of Arrythmia, Japanese Heart Rythm Society.
Here’s another on-going review and comparison of mobile, handheld ECG instruments.
Comparison and review of portable, handheld, 1-lead/channel ECG / EKG recorders by James W Grier, Department of Biological Sciences, North Dakota State University. He started his review in 2006 and most recently updated it March 2019. Dr. Grier provides excellent advice to the layperson using one of these monitors:
For the vast majority of layperson users of handheld ECG devices, in my experience with many friends, contacts, and colleagues, you will want/need the device for a given problem such as afib, be using it while under physician/cardiologist care, and only use/need it for a relatively short period of time (generally less than a year and often even less than a month) ... until the problem has been better identified and, hopefully, solved by an operation and/or medications. Your role as a patient doing home monitoring is to to simply obtain the recordings and pass them on to your physician, not to read and understand the results, but be able to properly record and either store or immediately send them to your physician
Anita Moorjani is author of the New York Times bestseller Dying to be Me. After her cancer diagnosis in 2002, Moorjani was taken to a hospital in 2006 where she lay in a coma for 30 hours, during which Moorjani had a Near Death Experience and returned with her cancer cured.
I’ve known her for many years and she is one of the few death experiencers that did not allow her experience to inflate her ego. She is a wonderful person.
We got together a few months ago and I helped her to understand her death experience along with why and how her cancer was cured. Her books are excellent.
Many people who claim to have had an NDE only had an ego rescue that caused a profound spiritual experience. This is true of some who have written several books and are famous.
So what was heaven like? And how does one leave one’s body when not on death’s door?
Absolute total bliss beyond words. Love so strong you feel like you will melt.
The worst part was coming back and remembering the experience. I not only have no fear of death, but a feeling of wanting to die so I can go back to it.
That is the unusual part for me. I never fully came back into this body. I straddle the fence of two worlds and perceive directly from my soul consciousness, not being restricted to my 5 physical senses.
Other people’s consciousness including stored memories since conception are physical to me.
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