I have experimented with the dosage of the beta blocker I received after I was briefly hospitalized earlier this summer with a fairly severe arrhythmia. I was asked to start with 1 tablet of 25 mg metoprolol (depot) per day, which is well below the usual therapeutic dosage of 4 up to 8 tablets. Then again almost everything in my life is a counter-indicator for betablockers, except only for the occasional arrhythmia (imagine the skip-a-beat part of drinking ungodly amounts of coffee, then multiply the chaos with 20)  and also occasional tachycardia (racing heart). Blood pressure is nice, blood vessels are wide open and relaxed, and resting heart rate is … slow. Slooooow.

I started reacting three years ago when I found resting heart rate was below 60, which is considered abnormal if you are not exercising. Not necessarily dangerous, but definitely weird. And I have not been exercising since I was in grade school, and finally got into my thick head that I was born with exercise asthma and running or jumping caused me to gasp for breath for a long time.  Unsurprisingly, most of the asthmatics I know tend to be on the chubby side (and up) and are prone to high blood pressure and high heart rates. After all, even people who don’t exercise will have spent their younger years horsing around, but people like me could never do that.  So if my heart rate had been above 80, I would have reluctantly accepted it. This was just weird.

Over the next year, it continued to slide to 55, where it stayed for a good while. Then further down to 50. Which was creepy, but I survived. Now?  Just over 40. I am not sure if my body is ridiculously slow in flushing metoprolol out of my system (I reduced the dose to half and then waited 24 hours, no difference) or whether this is my new permanent resting heart rate after the arrhythmia episode. In fact, I am not even sure if it came after that episode or before it (and maybe even caused it).  What I know is that it is patently absurd that I should have the resting pulse of a national level athlete when all I do is walk. (Admittedly I do walk typically 2-3 hours a day during work days, a little less on weekends, but it is still walking.)

So if I keep living, will my pulse be 35? 30? 25? I am pretty sure there are limits to how slowly a heart can beat and still do its job. But for now, it works fine when I don’t get one of my rare attacks. Weeks go by and I am not weak or dizzy or easily tired. It seems perfectly natural. But it is not. I am not 100% sure something is wrong, but I am 100% sure something is weird.

In today’s exciting (physical) heart adventures: Took a walk and as usual lately, my pulse was about 15 beats lower than it used to be. So I decided to give it a boost by walking up the stairs to Uranienborg, the vantage point atop a cliff in the middle of town. The climb is about 60 meters up, with stairs and plenty of platforms, and I walked slowly. By my calculations a pulse of 120 would be safe – 135 is what I used to get to without getting winded. I may have miscalculated, because at 117 it started to climb on its own, even if I stopped and started walking slowly downward again. My pulse continued up to 175 and stuck there a little while.

I am at home now (at 18:00), and heart rate is close to 90 while sitting, a bit of a change from just above 50 the last few days. It certainly justifies my claim that my heart has only two gears: Too Slow, and Too Fast.

I m feeling weak and drained, as if I have been working hard and long. But my heartbeat is quite regular, as far as I can sense, and I can to some degree influence it by meditation-like mind states. For the time being, I am letting it run its course. Yesterday after walking till my legs were tired, my heart returned to resting rate as soon as my skinny butt hit the chair. At least the way it is now, there should be plenty of blood flowing through my body, which my muscles and other tissues can use to recharge.

Edit to add: At 23 (11 in the night) my heart rate is below 60 again. It seems to have slowed down most quickly at first and then more and more gradually. Well, that is to be expected. It is as if my heart rate broke through some barrier that kept it down, and then gradually returned.

I wonder if the “long tail” of the event was partly because the episode still had some power to scare me. I know my heart rate is high for several hours after a credible threat to my health, like the time that guy threatened to break my kneecaps. Mind and body are not really separate, at least not while we are alive. That is also why I could calm my heart once it came within a range where I recognize the feeling of its speed. I could not do that when it was racing full speed, and not during the fairly long episode of random flapping on the 11th. I actually tried repeatedly to control my body using the normal techniques, but could not get a grasp of it.

If there was a safe environment for me to trigger the faster ranges of heart level, I might become able to yoke them to my mind and control them. But as it is now, once the heart range passes beyond my level of normal experience, it goes off on its own, like a half-tame bird fleeing its cage and not returning until it feels like it.

7:15 PM: I probably have some body-wide infection: I am feeling weak as if I have worked too hard for too long (I haven’t at all) and my heart rate is 90-100 instead of 50-60 when sitting. Temperature is only slightly elevated though, 37.6 instead of 37.

This is not at all a similar feeling to the racing heart episodes, which are local to the heart and more sudden and intense.

There are no respiratory symptoms and no extraordinary digestive disturbances. I have what seems to be a few infected insect bites on my lower right leg though. But I have those often, insects like to bite through my socks.

I also drank perhaps half a glass of Cola Zero today, something I have not done before. That was around 4 PM, the non-local symptoms started around 5 and peaked around 7. So if I believed in the fantasies about aspartame, I would totally blame that. But science. Well, I suppose if I get better, I can do my own science by drinking it again and see if I get sick again. Infections are a lot less controllable.

Come to think of it, I also drank a cup of warm broth around the same time as the Cola Zero. But it is not years since I’ve been drinking that, just months.

10:30 PM: Heart rate down to around 80, and each beat is much more quiet. So it seems the acute response is waning.

00:30 : Heart rate under 70, so not far from normal. Taking another half tablet of Metoprolol, took one half when I came home from work and my heart was beating hard and fast. Did not really notice much difference then. Temperature is also down to normal. So my body seems to have gone back to normal, except for a slight headache and the tickling feeling on my leg in the general vicinity of the insect bites (some inches around them).

I was staying up longer tonight, my guts being more active than they should be at this time of the night. Eventually I was feeling unpleasantly cold, so went to bed. As I laid down, I could feel my heartbeat. It was slow. Very slow. Curious and slightly worried, I grabbed the smartphone by my bedside and ran the heart rate checker. It showed 46 beats per minute. The shock of seeing the number so low made my heart speed up to over 50. Light knows what it was before I noticed. But it was really slow.

A low resting pulse is usually a sign of very good health, but in my case it is entirely out of proportion.  To have a resting pulse like this – and it was even slower when I first noticed – I would have to be a national-level athlete. But I have never even run the 60-meter, because of my exercise asthma. It is like my heart lives its own life (and not in a romantic sense). It beats slower and slower for each passing year, if not month. If it continues this way, there will be a point where it stops entirely.

Of course, there have been those other times when it sped up, sometimes to above what should be its maximum. As we said about the horse back on my childhood’s farm: It had only two gears, too slow and too fast. I thought that was funny, but not so much when it is my heart which my life depends on.

That said, it’s been a good time. I just don’t want it to stop for no good reason.

I have never before had migraine in the night – the only trigger has ever been reading in intense light, either direct sunlight or lightly cloudy. But tonight I started to get bright shining colors in my field of vision at 1 AM, just before I was supposed to go to bed. This worried me a bit since it did not follow the usual pattern, and I briefly wondered if it was something else, like a stroke or a tumor. But acting on the most likely explanation, I put on 1Hz brainwave entrainment. The aura soon stopped growing, then faded, and I fell asleep in my chair.

I am not sure what would have happened had not my Ingress alert woken me up 45 minutes or so later. But it did. At first I had only a slight headache, but it has grown stronger since, and I am not also queasy. At least in this regard it follows the pattern of a migraine, so that is good.

I have written about these attacks from time to time almost from the beginning of my journal in the late 1990es. Back then I had no idea what they came from. After 2005 I have concluded that they come from eating fat. I can process small quantities of fat, but if I eat a normal Norwegian diet, I get these attacks frequently. If I stick to a low-fat diet, they don’t happen at all.

Usually an attack start by a feeling of intense cold, coming from within. It feels as if I have already spent a lot of time in a cold place and am chilled through. My muscles are stiff and I start shivering and shaking.  The next symptom is usually intense contractions of the bowels, causing abdominal pain and a hurried visit to the bathroom. The stomach is also upset, but not to the point of throwing up, more a deep vague nausea. A sense of dread is typically the third, although these three can sometimes switch places. At this stage my intelligence is reduced – it is hard for me to think clearly, and typing or handwriting is filled with typos; also my senses seem to be dampened, which is why I used to call these attacks “darkenings” before I knew what triggered them. The final stage is overwhelming sleepiness which cannot be resisted. I usually fall asleep in my chair. When I wake up (which I have obviously done every time so far) the attack is over. But my digestion is usually upset for a day or two afterwards.

Today’s attack, if that is what it is, has not been typical. I have been sleepy during the day, napping and waking up just as sleepy. It was similar enough that I thought of Darkening, but without the other symptoms it did not seem reasonable. Then while I was sleepily playing Neverwinter a bit, my heart suddenly started beating very hard. Not extremely fast, but very hard. That certainly made me take notice. Some minutes later, I suddenly started freezing, even though it was not that cold. A little on the chilly side, but nothing as extreme as this (shivering, shaking).  And while my stomach is a little upset, I have not yet had colon spasms.

I know my fat intake has been in the borderlands lately, as I have taken to eating a delicious bread made with oats, sunflower seeds and roasted pumpkin seeds. These seeds are full of fat, and I eat it with mustard and a salad spread made with fine-cut vegetables and mayonnaise. (The mayonnaise is not particularly rich, but this ingredient is one of the ones I tolerate the least usually.) I guess it is possible that I have bumped into the border line of fat intake I can handle, but judging from the incomplete symptoms, I may not have gone far over the line at least.

Or it could be something different, I suppose. The heart gallop is not part of the usual sequence.