My First Stress Echocardiogram

The stress test is done, but I won’t have the results until the doctor looks at the data and his nurse calls me, I guess. It was not as grueling as I feared and/or hoped it would be… it seems that for a stress echo, they only need you with an elevated heart-rate, above 85% of an estimated maximum, not at your maximum effort. They must have just used the old 220-age formula (bogus!) to guess my max rate (183 bpm), so they wanted to get me somewhere over 85% of that (155 bpm) on the treadmill, then stop and have me lie down on the table real quick to get my heart imaged. (I’ll note that 220-age doesn’t seem all that far off for me, but I’m surprised they use it — as far as I know it is generally discredited, and I know one person at least who differs quite a bit from the formula.)

Before hopping on the treadmill, they attached a full belt-mounted set of EKG electrodes to my chest, and before that, they had to shave a few spots… I look a little like Steve Carell after a half-complete chest waxing now. They took my blood pressure twice at rest: first it was 128 over something, then a little later, 142 over something. After they started the treadmill on a very slow setting and I had been walking for a couple of minutes, it was back down to 120 over something. Are they sure these blood pressure readings are useful? It might just be a random number generator.

They used the Bruce Protocol for stepping up the treadmill speed and incline. Here’s how it went.

Stage	Speed (mph)	Pace (minutes/mile)	Incline	Comments
1: 0-3 minutes	1.7	35	10%	zzzzz
2: 3-6 minutes	2.5	24	12%	Stretch, yawn
3: 6-9 minutes	3.4	18	14%	Brisk walk
4: 9-12 minutes	4.2	14	14%	This would be a very slow jog if not for the hill
5: 12-14.5 minutes	5	12	16%	Sweating profusely now

It’s the slope that gets you, not the speed. I would have liked to give stage 6 a try, but after my heartbeat got up to 159 or 169 and stayed there for a while, the nurse who was doing the treadmill part (and taking the blood pressure readings every three minutes) told me I could quit when I wanted. A minute or two later, I guess she decided that waiting for *me* to want to quit wasn’t the way to go :-) We stopped two and a half minutes into stage 5, I think. That initiated what the echo tech had described as the “hard part”: quickly getting over and onto the examination table. It wasn’t bad. Except for all the sweat. It was warm in there.

So there you go. Hopefully that will be my last time on a treadmill for a few years.