A Little History

Before I get started with the trip to France, I need to give some background leading up to everything. This trip was going to be somewhat different than my last trip, in a variety of ways. I had some very exciting and challenging goals for this trip. Lots of serious mountains to cycle, some new ones and some old with different routes to the top. And I was going to have some friends join me along the way.

As they say, the best laid plans….. In order to accomplish any real cycling goals, the first thing in to get into some form of fitness. That is not generally an issue, but does take some effort to get to a point where you fell “ready”. So I rode my bike a lot this last fall while I was in Arizona and things were going pretty good down there. And ski season went well during the winter too. I took a trip to Southern California in March to really start doing some more serious riding with friends in the challenging Santa Monica mountains and that was going well, making some real strides. But I had to return to Washington for cataract surgery which I discovered back in November. The thing about eye surgery is that while you recover, you cannot raise your blood pressure very much because it can damage your eye. So I had to basically do nothing for over a month, losing a lot of my recent fitness. But once I made it through the eye healing process, it was time to get back on the bike to resume training. After one particular ride, and not an extremely difficult one at that, I was just not feeling very great, not recovering as I should have. After a couple of hours of discomfort, I decided I needed to seek some medical attention since I really had never experienced anything like this before. So off to the ER at the hospital in Wenatchee. I explained that I was having some chest discomfort so they ran me through some tests to see what was going on. I ended up staying in the hospital for 4 days! Everyone suspected some form of mild heart attack which seemed pretty crazy to me, but I couldn’t deny the symptoms I was having. I had some elevated levels of an enzyme called Troponin which is released by the heart when it is under stress. A typical level is 0.00 -0.03. Mine reached a level close to 7.0 so something was definitely going on. So I was put on nitroglycerin and other medications to try to resolve the symptoms. The nitro gave me headaches, so then I was put on a small morphine dosage for that. They did a quick x-ray to see if that revealed anything, but it didn’t. Next was a CAT scan of my heart with a catheter that injected a dye to get a good look for any artery blockage. I think everyone was shocked when that came back negative. My arteries were pretty much spic and span clean. So next, it was to wait for a spot for the MRI to really get a good look at anything else that might have been causing my discomfort (which had resolved itself during the first day mind you). That took 2 days to get a spot and I could not leave the hospital or risk losing my turn in line so to speak. Finally, I got the MRI and it revealed that I had incurred some inflammation of my heart, most likely due to some infection. So the bottom line was that, aside from the inflammation, there was nothing really wrong structurally with my heart. No one really had any answers as to why this happened, but the only real cure was rest! Up to three months of rest! This was going to cause a problem with the trip to France!

After talking to all of the doctors, we agreed that I should still go on the trip, just not to do any real difficult rides during this recovery time. Flat rides were OK, hard mountain passes were not. Well, I might have considered just canceling the entire trip, but I had these friends coming and it was still going to be a fun trip none the less. So it was decided. France it is!