My pulse is telling me that I am in amazing health, and should probably go train for a marathon or something.  The pain in my upper jaw is telling me that I’ve got some kind of infection again (you will remember that I wrote about these 10 years ago too on a regular basis. I still don’t know what it is.)

It is Saturday again, so I stayed up an hour longer and overslept by two hours. The sun was back after a mostly gray week with scattered showers.  Before it could get too hot, I decided to mow the lawn in the early afternoon.  I put on my pulse watch, as I do for such occasions.  To me, mowing the lawn is exercise.  That said, I think I need a new lawnmower. I have failed to sharpen the blades on this one; I am just not a do-it-yourself type I guess.  As it is now, it flattens far more grass than it cuts, so I have to go over the same stretch repeatedly to actually get it cut.  Even then some straws will rise again when I have left.

Anyway, I put on the pulse watch. It showed 65 beats per minute when I was just standing there.  That may not sound strange, but it is.  I have a resting pulse of 55 when I don’t have any infections and haven’t exercised the last day or two.  (Either one of these will evidently set off some internal work in the body that requires extra energy, presumably millions of tiny nanomachines repairing and restocking the broken or depleted parts.) That’s a pretty comfortable number, 55.  There is a good chance that most health personnel will have a noticeably higher pulse than that.  For the most part, only athletes and the occasional mutant will have much lower.  But that’s while lying flat on my back and thinking of silence.

Getting up requires a lot more work for the heart since suddenly the blood has to fight against gravity, almost 190 centimeters of uphill from ground level.  Also, you don’t notice but some pretty big muscles are hard at work keeping you upright and in balance.  So my standing pulse is normally more like 80.  I honestly have no idea why it was so low today, especially since I clearly have an infection in my face.  Infections should normally get the immune system to roll out, requiring more energy and therefore more oxygen.  But evidently my immune system is a lot less worried than I am about this inflammation. Whether this is a good or a bad thing, time will show.

The slow pulse does not seem to be brachycardia/ bradycardia,  since it rises in response to exercise. After a few minutes of mowing, my pulse was within the usual training range, and stayed there.  A doctor will normally not diagnose bradycardia unless there is fatigue, dizziness, fainting or heart conditions apart from the slow beat.  I have such symptoms very rarely, about once a year, and not the same symptom every year either.  So despite having been hospitalized twice with heart monitor after fainting for no good reason (some years ago), nobody has ever hinted that I needed any kind of treatment.  I guess being symptom-free 364 days a year is pretty good for a human.

Now if I could do that well against the perennial infections of my jaws, it would be right peachy.