Things are stable.

At the end of November 2019, I had my regular half-year meeting at the heart failure department.
This is just a talk to see how things are.

They will check your “dairy” to see if your weight and blood pressure are ok or if there are any remarks.
So far things are looking ok.

Only my weight was slightly going up in the last few days.
So the advice is to take some extra medication because it looks like you are retaining water.

To prevent retaining water, you use less salt and stick to your drinking/liquid limits.
Using less salt is not easy.
You need to check everything you eat, to make sure that there is not too much salt in it.
But as always, all the nice food has a lot of salt in it.
And sometimes you forget to check or don’t think about it, so the next days you will “suffer” for it.

Since last summer, my weight was stable and I was very happy with it and about it.
No idea why suddenly my weight was going up again.
Maybe it the cold weather or I was not careful enough with what I was eating.
So for two days taking the extra medication again.

They also asked about walking.
If I could walk for longer then 30min.
I could, but on my own speed and as long as there are no stairs or “hills”
Then I would start breathing heavily.
She also asked me, how about walking and talking?
Only when I started thinking about it, I realized that doing both at the same time is not so easy.
Maybe in my mind, it is a bit strange but I indeed noticed that sometimes it was hard.

At first, you think it is because you are walking to fast or so.
But they told me that this is normal.
Walking and talking takes energy.
For people without heart failure, this sounds strange.
But for me, this is part of it.
Something I need to keep in mind.

Because it also was some time ago that they had checked my blood, it was time again to check it.
This is because of all the medications and the reduced kidney function, they would like to keep an eye on it.
So I had passed by the lab to give some blood.
I could call back the next day for the results.

The next day the results were in and it was ok.
It was slightly improved the reduced kidney function.
This did not mean it was working normal, but it was slightly getting better.

For now, because things are stable, one more time an appointment for after 6 months and after that it will be a yearly event.

Next check-up of the pacemaker and my talk with the specialist will be in January 2020 and hopefully, he can give me the results of the optimization echo and hopefully there is some improvement of the heart.