Gone Nucular

If you need a reason to pass up on the all-you-can-eat Bacon Bar, let me clue you in to something you have to do if you survive a heart attack.

If you don't survive, you have much bigger problems, so this doesn't apply to you.

A Thallium Exercise, a.k.a. Nucular Treadmill test:

For starters, they didn't want me to take my Atenelol for 48 hours prior to the test. They wanted my Betas thoroughly unblocked, so they could come as close as possible to killing me while being able to say, 'Not really.'




They also forbid caffeine for 24 hours prior. I could build a gulag for anyone who would deny me my diet cola.

Oh, and no booze for 24 hours before. Which was okay—I lost my will to live when I had to forgo caffeine, so what's a martini? What? Just because it would have been my only solace in the face of decaffeinated world?



They do also tell you not to eat, but who can think of food when they're junk-sick for soda and entering delirium tremens?

The reason for the caffeine ban, by the way, is they want to be able to give you dipyridamole or adenosine or some other unpronounceably nasty drug in case the treadmill doesn't get your heart rate up enough. My Mom had this done once, and said she'd rather just have a heart attack: she'd lived with a major blockage for years but never felt pain in her chest on par with that. It tempted me to go ahead and drink my USRDA 3 liters of Sam's Choice Diet Cola and then, if they tried to give me the bad stuff, use that as my trump card.



So the morning of the test, I'm about to lose consciousness from caffeine withdrawals, and first thing, they want to put a needle in me. An IV lock thingy. So not like a shot, more like a needle that I have to play nice and be friends with all morning.
They inject you with radioactive shit and tell you to go read for a while. It takes 45 minutes for you to be ready to turn from David Banner to Incredible Hulk.

Then they put you on a bed and wrap a gamma camera around you, and tell you to hold still for twenty minutes. They tell you to not even talk, then they try to engage you in conversation.

Now it's time for them to shave the hair off spots on your chest, stick electrodes to you and hook you up to a bundle of wires. Then you get to go on the treadmill.

"Can you do another two minutes if it goes even faster?" This is after they've seen your heart rate get alarming into the danger zone and your blood pressure is starting to freak them out a little.



When you cry uncle, they shoot more Hulk juice into your hep-lock, then have you trudge a bit more. Then they tell you to read again. Oh, and to please take your Atenelol because your blood pressure is really pimping.

Then it's back to the gamma camera, though a bit shorter trip through it.

They called a few hours later to say I'm fine. Which is good news. But all those times at Shoney's Breakfast Bar, covering my plate with bacon in my twenties, was it worth it?