Recent Activity

DATE                                6-Aug-14      16-Aug-14          19-Aug-14

Duration (min)                 0:15:04           0:15:04               0:15:04

Distance (km)                   6.818               5.7                       7.125

Ave Power                        142                  116                       150

Ave Speed (kph)             27.1               23.1                       28.1

Ave Heart Rate (bpm)      115                98                        110

Performance                    1.23                1.18                       *

Elev Gain                          0                     0                            0

Difficulty (%)                   80                   80                          100

Completed (%)                 59                  50                          50

* Why is this blank? Well, my lovely computer that is attached to the trainer decided it needed to restart about 30 seconds from the end of my training ride. So the other numbers for today are pretty well what I remember but Kathy had taken a picture of the screen a minute or so earlier. So I extrapolated. Except for this one, which I don't know how it is calculated. So I guess you have to take the whole thing with a grain of salt. I do think that I have improved over 16 August.

I'm my own rabbit. I have a pretty good idea what I did last time and try to beat those numbers. And I remember thinking "I'm doing better." So the numbers are pretty close.

The numbers on the 16^th reflect a discussion I had with my neurologist. Well, actually the arterial neurologist, if that's a title. Since I've been actively seeing the neurologist, the question has been "why did I have a clot that caused a stroke? Where did it come from?" As I remember our discussion, most often clots come from one of two places. A tear in an artery or atrial fibrillation. They haven't been able to see evidence of any tears, so they think is atrial fibrillation. Tomorrow I go in to get some sort of the device that records my heart activity - a transportable EKG in a plastic sticker. If it proves that I have atrial fibrillation, the way that they would deal with it would be anticoagulant therapy. Big problem. I've got an AVM in my brain. Not a good idea to give anticoagulant therapy of the nature that they intend for arterial fibrillation to a person with that type of AVM.

So what to do? Doc says, "have you thought of gamma knife? I'd thought of it because I'd heard of it. And because of my history and what I'd been told before, I'd dismissed it. He wants me to think about it. I don't want to. What I've been told in the past is any type of surgery would leave me severely weakened on my right side or paralyzed on my right side. I'm already severely weakened on my left side. I don't want to add the right to it.

My first thought after our discussion was "I'm scared!" Then I thought, "I've had a good run. This is probably a good time to get a Do-Not-Resuscitate."

I'll keep doing what I've been doing, but it will be with a little bit higher risk. Not that this conversations or this decision is the last one. We'll have a lot more serious conversations. The doc and me.

So that's my report for this week. Talk at you later.