I Guess I'll Add more Me Me Me

Since it's really all I've been doing over the last week or so - around the routine house and yard maintenance - let me do an update to the mid-July post and my puzzles with Afib.  

The thing that struck me as most interesting was commenter millerized's talk about Benfotiamine, fat soluble B1.  Like him, I started a once a day dose, but instead of 250mg/day, I went with a 300 mg/day thinking it didn't matter and the bottle size of 1x/day for 90 days sounded like a good start.  That comment was dated July 14, and I started taking them on the 19th (Saturday) - which means last night was two weeks worth.  Has it made a difference?  

Possibly but nothing dramatic.  My issue has been having afib whenever they tested me for it but I never really knew it.  More reading told me a couple of non-dramatic signs that are common include shortness of breath in irregular amounts and timing.  I started paying more attention and seemed to notice something like that - several deeper breaths correlated to nothing else that I could tell.  Another non-dramatic symptom mentioned was some balance issues.  I had noticed (and mentioned to Mrs. SiG) that I was developing a tendency to drift side-to-side a bit while walking.  Both of those seem to have improved, but since I haven't been able to get something that could tell me I'm having an Afib episode I don't know if that has gotten less frequent - or changed at all.  

ADDED: Another difference that could well explain an improvement besides the Benfotiamine is that my doc increased my dosage of the beta blocker metoprolol.  Since 2013, I had been taking 50mg/day and he increased that 75 mg/day. 

I was supposed to call the cardiologist's office to tell them if I was more interested in finding more details on the ablation or cardioversion and I told them I was leaning toward ablation.  They told me they would call the office of the electrophysiologist they refer to and that office would contact me.  That hasn't happened.   

A sign of "something's wrong" in my mind is that my pulse has been irregular, with things I can feel taking my pulse the old fashioned way of "put a finger on an artery and count it with your watch."  Some years ago, for general entertainment (shits and grins) I bought one of those little pulse oximeters - you stick a finger in it and it counts your pulse.  Both the old school and the new tech show some irregularity and my pulse being faster in general than it used to be.  I used to have a morning pulse around 55-60, now if it's more regular, it's 80-ish, and if it's less regular, the extra beats put that up to reading 90-100.  

I spent some time looking at Smart Watches and was ready to pull the trigger until I realized that there's nothing that can do an EKG while I'm riding the bike.  They all require using two hands.  We normal people can't take our hands off the handlebars for 30 seconds.  If I felt weird, I could pull over at a corner or a 7-11 and take one with a Smart Watch or something like the Kardia Mobile that connects to the phone, but all of the ways to do an EKG-like test effectively eliminate use when you're not sitting quietly (or standing quietly, I suppose).  That talked me out of it but that only lasted a week or so.  I'm still likely to get one soon.   

Since I need something cute to wrap up with and this is at least tangentially related...

Somewhere, when I was talking about the times I spent waiting around in hospitals the people I was talking with asked if I noticed that the hospital staff was looking chunkier than they used to. Thanks to the dieticians following the "My Plate" from the Fed.gov, we assume. 

EDIT 8/4/25 at 0825 to add:  Commenter Igor at 0739 reminded me of something I forgot to add.  It goes in the third paragraph, so I added it there, as a new, short, paragraph.