Give Your Heart a Rest
And I’m not talking about the cheesy lovely way.
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Yesterday while talking to my uncle, he told me that last week he had a strange episode. Out of the blue, he began feeling dizzy, and his vision went blank. His legs began to shake, and an icy sensation ran through his whole body. He did not lose consciousness, but he did have to sit down and rest for a few minutes. While all this was happening, my cousin ran for the blood pressure monitor. The outcome: high blood pressure.
He told me that this was his third episode in three months, and although it was not frequent, it was enough for him to visit the cardiologist for a thorough check-up. During the ultrasound the doctor detected an arrhythmia, so they asked my uncle to undergo two more studies: an electrocardiogram and a resistance test.
In the resistance test, he obtained the expected results, and the electrocardiogram showed no abnormalities.
They must continue looking for the root of the problem.
All these studies, mainly the ultrasound, left my uncle with a new way of thinking about his heart.
He knew it existed, but he took it for granted.
Watching his heart beating on the ultrasound, my uncle felt moved. He knew he had a heart and that it was beating all the time. That’s something learned from a young age, but many of us don’t realize what it means until we can see it. Such was the case with my uncle.
The heart never rests, doesn’t take days off, or needs a few minutes to recover after running a marathon. It simply beats so that each of us can live. In chatting with my uncle, he used the cliché phrase we have all heard at least once in our lives.
“There is no doubt that the human body is the perfect machine.”
The heart does so much for me that I will do something for it.
Even when we don’t see our heart and commonly don’t feel it, we must not forget that it is part of us, and just as it does so much to make us well, we can help it to make its job more bearable, how do we do this? We must be careful about what we put into our bodies…
