Saving My Knees: How I Proved My Doctors Wrong and Beat Chronic Knee Pain Read Free Page B

follow with a hard beat as if to catch up. The pattern would keep repeating, affecting every eighth beat or so. The episodes would last for hours at a time over several days.
    The onset of irregular heartbeats can be terrifying. Usually your heart expands and contracts silently in the background; you notice its presence only by pressing your hand against your rib cage. Odd heartbeats alert you to the possible frailty of this organ. Sometimes I found myself pounding my chest, alarmed and frustrated, as if I could manually bump it back into a proper rhythm, like a bad case of hiccups.
    At the time I was cycling 140 miles a week. I would have cut back, except the abnormal heartbeats always smoothed out with aerobic activity. When my pulse cleared 130, there was never a problem. Also I never had dangerous symptoms of dizziness, faintness, or weakness. Still, not knowing what was going on unsettled me. I sought out a cardiologist.
    Before the appointment, I chugged twenty ounces of caffeine-rich Mountain Dew to try to induce the strange beats. It worked. During my electrocardiogram test, they showed up perfectly. The doctor, at first surprised to see someone looking relatively young and fit, questioned me about my cycling and placed his stethoscope against my chest. “Strong heart,” he said simply. He also checked my ankles and didn’t find any swelling.
    A few minutes later, after studying the EKG printout, he allayed my fears. I had nothing to worry about, he said. The unusual reading was what you might expect in an endurance athlete. All the hard exercise forced my heart to adapt and pump blood more efficiently. My resting pulse in the morning was usually forty to forty-two; the average unconditioned heart beats sixty to eighty times a minute.
    Once I stopped training, the problem would probably go away, he said. He turned out to be correct.
    After escaping that brush with mortality, I felt stronger than ever. I had faith in my body’s ability to recover from any kind of illness or injury. One day while cycling in a small park, I ventured onto the road’s sandy shoulder to pass a slow-moving groundskeeping vehicle. When I tried to hop back up onto the pavement, my front tire twisted. I went down hard, like a sack of cement, and cracked or bruised a rib. For days it hurt to sneeze or breathe deeply. That slowed me down on my bike, but for no more than a month.
    Then came a very nasty collision on a windy fall day. I was among half a dozen cyclists sprinting on State Road A1A, the slender route that snakes down the eastern Florida coast beside the beaches. Hurricane Wilma had recently raked the neighborhood and knocked down a flashing-light warning sign for a drawbridge. I blew past everyone on the sprint and tucked my head to take a breath. I looked up to see the red-and-white safety arm for the drawbridge lowering directly in front of me.
    There was no time to react. I slammed into it at twenty-five miles an hour. The arm, made out of what seemed to be heavy aluminum, caught me across the upper chest and arms. I was thrown to the ground as my bike skidded out from under me. It was a stunning, violent crash.
    Without hesitating, I sprang to my feet. The drawbridge arm was dented in the shape of a rooftop profile. Supporting cables lay about on the road like strands of spaghetti.
    I grabbed my bicycle and tried to straighten the handlebars. The other riders rolled up. They seemed amazed to find me upright with nothing broken, only bruises. One gave me an incredulous look and said, “That’s the most amazing thing I’ve seen.” Later it occurred to me that, had that drawbridge arm been ten inches higher, I would have been decapitated.
    But bruises didn’t bother me. They would heal. I always healed well.
    I didn’t know the day would soon come when that confidence would be thoroughly shattered.

2   Prelude to a Fall
     
    My problems all started because of a change of scenery.
    In January of 2006, to quell an itch for