I had my second follow-up appointment with my cardiologist today. Actually, it wasn't MY cardiologist but rather A cardiologist from the same practice. Tuh-may-toe Tuh-ma-toe if you ask me.

Anyway, I was told initially by my thoracic surgeon that I would have these meetings every month for one year and then I'd have a treadmill stress test every year after that.

Well, this is one of many instances where your thoracic surgeon and your cardiologist may contradict one another.

My blood pressure was 110 over 80 (kickass) and my resting heart rate was 62 bpm, down from a startling 9o bpm just 3 months ago. Apparently this exercise thing is really working out for me.

Speaking of which, I took in a spreadsheet where I track my exercise, calories and carbs burned, etc. and showed it to her. I did so to confirm that it was okay that I was pushing this hard.

She looked at the sheet and said "WOW!!! You're really burning a lot of calories! You are, at this point, free to do whatever you'd like or feel like you can do athletically."

Not bad for a mere 10 weeks after bypass, eh?

She then said that they'd like to put me on Zocor or Lipitor or some drug in the "or" family apparently. These drugs are meant to lower your LDL (bad cholesterol) and increase the amount of HDL (good cholesterol) in your system all while helping to prevent hardening of the arteries.

I asked if there were any side effects, and not the television commercial litigation prevention kind, but the actual kind, and I was told there were none to speak of. However, I found this on a drug website:

· gas, bloating, nausea, stomach upset, heartburn, abdominal pain, constipation, or diarrhea;

Red flag everybody. Turns out that Zocor is in the same family as Lipitor, which I took while in the hospital in addition to Zocor. That event is covered in this blog and more in this blog.

So now I'm torn. I don't want to put myself thru that, but it could have been a by-product of the narcotics that I'm no longer taking as well. We shall see. If you are reading 3am posts that include grunting noises, then you know I've made the wrong decision and that I will be off this Zocor in short order.

So now that I'm free to do "whatever I want to do," the question becomes this:

What do I want to do?

p.s. for those of you that are already somewhat frightened by my entry into the kingdom of exercise, here's another nugget for you to choke on. After my treadmill work last night, I hit the floor and did 10-15 minutes of serious ab work. Like crunches that saw me laying flat with my feet straight up in the air Roger Clemens style. (I saw these on ESPN one night and I figured if they kept Roger in baseball, they could help me).

I also, along with the creative genius of Specialist Cashion (82nd Airborne, Ret.) have come up with a way to make the playing the X-Box portion of my workout exercise as well. See, if I put velcroed wrist weights on while I am holding that controller, I can also do curls, arm extensions, or just carry the extra weight for extra benefit.

I love that my friends are actually helping to validate the fact that a 37 year old needs a video game system to exercise well.

In exchange for this brilliance, Mr. Cashion and family will be dining on rack of lamb Sunday afternoon as they try lamb for the first time. Their life is to be changed forever.

I'll talk to you soon, people. I have to go walk a lap around the office....

PEACE!!!