‘Forgive me father, for I have binged. It’s been 3 days since my last confection. I have indulged in the ways of the flesh and have succumbed to the dangers of excessive Low-density lipoprotein.”

a few weeks long ago i decided to go for the yearly free health check provided by the company. the health check comprised of the usual blood, urine, ecg and x-ray. pretty standard stuff. the results came out a week after that and here’s where it got interesting. i was supposed to complete the health check with a stress test so i had my running shoes on, walked to the hospital and registered myself. a nurse came to take my bp, everything checked out, i was normal. then i waited a bit to see the doc about my results. she took my bp again and remarked that it was high!
suddenly i am hypertensive! while the other results was normal – sugar, uric acid, etc she told me that the ecg readings indicated that i had lvh or Left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH)  which is the thickening of the myocardium (muscle) of the left ventricle of the heart. wth! after that she said she did not recommend that i do the stress test as i may keel over and die. all the while i am thinking: i play badminton for 2 hrs twice a week, walk most of the time because i am carless and i can’t take a stress test? seriously?
she then recommended that i consult a cardiologist and made out a letter for the insurance and company.

ordinarily i wouldn’t even consider going but since it was all being paid for by aia, i decided to make the appointment, but with another doctor, not the one she recommended(as i heard bad reviews about). so i was set to see dr hendrick chia at sun med on a friday.

as fate would have it, i had an evening meeting with a client at le meridien at sentral the night before and after the meeting the
client invited us for dinner at prime!

resistance was futile. i practically chucked caution to the wind and ordered a foie gras and wagyu beef! the client ordered a bottle of wine as well so at least there was some health aspect to the whole meal?
i must say, the breads were fantastic, there was a hearty walnut version and another which i could not discern coupled with a lovely selection of assorted butter.

and the foie gras and wagyu was to die for! ok probably not the best combination before seeing a cardio but what can i say, you only live once…
rather, you only get to patronise prime@le meridien once….

so came friday, with much trepidation, fear and trembling i marched on to the cardio’s. freaky as it may sound, i met not one, but two people that i knew there!
is the Big Guy trying to tell me something?
the first was a former church member, he had numbness in his right hand and discovered that he had a mild stroke.
when i asked his wife how old he was, she replied.”41, like you lor”. gasp.
the second was an ex saatchi art director who had brought her mom in for a consult.
the cardio, dr hendrick chia, turned out pretty good. he was soft spoken, took time to explain
and told me that an ecg was not the most accurate indicators of lvh.
it was, however, an indication that the hospital needed to milk more people into going for costly tests! i digress. he recommended an echocardiogram, which is a better and more accurate test. it was quite like an ultrasound, except they look at your ticker in detail, even the blood vessels going to the liver. if i passed the echo then he would have me do a stress test.

i went through the motions and the echo came out good, i did not have lvh after all!
i was primed for the stress test! so the female doc strapped what seemed like a gadzillion wires to my chest and with the bp arm thing and bp tube and ball i hopped on to the treadmill and went through all 5 levels, each level consisting of 3 mins, with a gradual incline at every level. and at each level she would take my bp to see if it was within the normal ranges. at level 4 she was asking me if i could go n, and that she could stop the machine at any time i said so. it was not that taxing really, having gone on the mill before at the gym. so i raced onto level 5, which required some brisk running. finally she said that i had reached a 100% and asked if i wanted to stop. i let out a victory woop which i am sure, echoed throughout the floor.

so 2 hours later i was back in the doc’s office and he took out the ecg from the stress test and declared me healthy – whew! however he did say that my cholesterol level from the health check was high, at 6. he then asked me to monitor my bp for 2 weeks and come back to see him again and let hm know if i want to be on cholesterol meds.
i then bought a bp monitoring gadjet from him for rm150 and have been taking down my bp at various random intervals since.
then last sunday i was at the ss2mall and they had a free blood cholesterol test and mine dropped to 5.58. that’s an improvement, no?

i guess when you are fast approaching the big five-oh there has to be certain life changing decisions that one has to make, especially concerning what you eat and exercise. which is why through divine intervention, i managed to get a membership to the club next door and have started to go back to the gym and swim in between.
gulam also recommended that i try a banana/broccoli/papaya smoothie every morning, which is what i have been consuming for the past 3 days now.
i must admit that there have been times when i was on a death-wish with the types of food i was consuming but nowadays it’s mainly oats and fruit(banana and mangoes) for lunch.
jen’s going for her op this coming monday and i see dr hendrick in a week, i think that’s enough of hospitals for one year.

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