I went to see John in ICU in the late morning to find that his vitals showed a resting pulse in the 130’s and a blood pressure around 90/60. Both numbers were extreme, which I commented on to Teri. Additionally, John was feeling worse than ever. When the nurse came in, Teri brought it up but she said it was no big deal…it had done that earlier and would get back to ‘normal’.
First things first. On a resting pulse for a 46-year old, normal could be anywhere from low 40’s in a highly trained aerobic athlete to the high 80’s of a completely out of shape chain smoker. The resting heart rate is an indicator of the strength (or weakness) of this critical pump. It’s a muscle and gets stronger with the right kind of exercise, doing its job more effectively by pushing more blood with each beat. John’s normal resting pulse, something the hospital had no idea about, was in the mid-50’s. When his heart reached the 130’s, it was 80 beats a minute over resting…and an issue.
When the surgeon heard the numbers and how poorly John was feeling, he quickly moved to put a scope into his stomach and found that the ulcerated artery was bleeding and things were critical. They worked feverishly to stop the bleeding and only later, when he was again stable and out of the woods, did they share the seriousness of the oversight by the nurse and how close he had come to dying.
Since so much depended on that resting heart rate, I suppose I’m surprised that the hospital doesn’t make some effort to determine what it is on its patients. I imagine that few non-exercising people pay any attention, but I can assure them that regular exercisers know. Mine runs in the high 40’s, so if it was anywhere near 100, I should think that would be significant. I don’t know what his nurse would have had to have seen for her to react…but it wouldn’t have gone too much higher before it would have been heading for zero.
Savannah and her boyfriend Kyle joined me for a Survival Workout. He’s lean and looked to be in good shape, but I cautioned him not to push too hard on the first go round…words that would be lost on him as they would have been lost on me if the roles had been reversed.
He did 30 push-ups, 12 pull-ups and 30 dips before we headed down the trail for some rock lifts. By the time we were doing our kariokies up my steepest hill, he’d done many different kinds of exercises than he’d done in a long time…and had come close to maxing every effort. One of two things was going to happen. Either he’d get green and want to vomit…or he’d kill the workout and demonstrate that he was an incredible physical specimen…better even than the ‘old man’. It was the former that manifested itself shortly after we reached the top of the hill.
“Dad…Kyle’s not feeling too well,” Savannah told me when I reached the bottom of the hill we’d just climbed. I hadn’t noticed that Kyle had stopped. I knew what had to be going through his mind and tried to soften the blow when he rejoined us.
“You have got to take it easy, Kyle. You’re in good shape…but the stuff we’re doing is functional exercise and you haven’t done it before. If you push to the max, you’re going to get sick. Try cutting it off when you think you could still do 5 reps of something. By the way…I got sick the first time I did it, too. Just don’t know how to go three-quarters effort,” I said.
I told them a story about how I’d been asked by a Sales Rep at a Fitness Club where I served as a trainer to take a prospective member through a workout and “make him sick.”
“Tell you what, hotshot. Suit up and I’ll make you puke first…then you can tell me if you still want me to do it to your customer there,” I said. He declined my offer.
Anyone…regardless of fitness level…can push themselves to the point of nausea. I pride myself on not letting people I’m assisting get to that point. It seldom accomplishes anything good. I felt bad about Kyle and should have made him do less. He’s young and strong and it didn’t do much but suffer his pride a tad. He continued to do the workout, though and was really pleased with it by the end. And then something happened that cemented our relationship.
“Look,” he said excitedly, pointing overhead
I turned to see a beautiful, immature eagle winging through the trees less than fifty feet away. Savannah looked up and then back. “Seriously? You’re just like me dad. Ugh,” she said, though I’m sure the ‘you’re just like my dad’ was meant as a compliment.
Survival Workout: 60 minutes.
Training Heart Rate: 100-150.
Calories burned: 600.
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