Fit Friday on a Saturday!

Since it's heart month it only makes sense that I'm going to tie fitness into heart health! For me there is nothing more important than my heart, it is my main motivator in being fit and active. Since Cardiovascular disease is one of the number one killers in North America it is crucial to do something to decrease your risk of developing this life threatening illness.

Endurance activities such as walking, running, biking and swimming are all incredibly beneficial for your heart health! The heart and stroke foundation recommends 150 minutes a week of this type of exercise which boils down to 21 minutes a day, which is incredibly easy to do. You can easily bike for 20 mins, or walk to work and reduce your risk of heart disease!! When doing this type of aerobic activity try to get into a steady state (constant heart rate) of 60-85% of your max heart rate. To get max HR: 220 - age then calculate 60-85% of this.

I know when you're young it seems like these risks are so far away and that you have plenty of time to get fit but if you start now you're more likely to stick with it and incorporate it into your lifestyle. Also just because you're young doesn't mean you're invincible, my issue may have been something I was born with but the scariest thing is we had no idea until I was 20 years old, so it's really good I had been taking care of my heart before then.  

My Heart on my Sleeve

February has in recent years become my favourite month of the year. Surprisingly so, since the weather is dreary, there's not a lot to do, school is crazy and I'm not particularly fond of Valentines Day. February is a whole month dedicated to heart health here, raising awareness about cardiovascular disease, risk of stroke/cardiac infarction and raising money to develop new techniques to treat these issues.

Majority of you know why this is so important to me, as in June 2011 I underwent open heart surgery through a Thoracotomy to remove and replace part of my descending Aorta which was too narrow. It was a birth defect and the process of actually getting it fixed was incredibly difficult; I had several surgeries prior which ended in a lot of pain and complications. My post here explains things a little more thoroughly.

 So you can expect a lot of heart themed prints, posts and loads of red in the next month. I must say I am very excited to talk about heart health a little bit more. My surgeries really were an eye opening experience and really helped me find my passion in life in regards to fitness for cardiovascular health :)

xJennaD

 

Fitness Friday: My Fitness Journey

This is my sexy, workout face.
My Fitness Story: As a kid I wasn't incredibly athletic, I played baseball and was horrendous at it. It wasn't until 8th or 9th grade I discovered my passion for soccer. This sustained my quota for physical activity until the end of High School. Then I was dealing with some anxiety issues and started running and going to the gym a couple times a week to combat this. Through University as my stress levels continued to increase I began to exercise more.

  We found out I had a heart condition that needed correcting in 2010, my activity level was crucial to my speedy recovery throughout all the surgeries. And honestly if I hadn't been so motivated to get back to being fit I don't know how well I would have recovered. Exercise helped me recoup not only physically but emotionally as well. It has been an incredible tool to deal with the depression of those years and allows me to feel I have control over my health. My goal is to be healthy and strong for the rest of my life!

  Now I am going to school to become a Personal Fitness Trainer and help others achieve their goals, recover after injury, and improve their overall well being. Fitness a really big part of my life and I thought it would be a fun feature to add to blogging. So welcome to Fitness Friday!! I shall have some tips to stay/get motivated, healthful information regarding exercise, nutrition, etc.

Summer 2012, Summer 2013

 

Tip number 1:

• Plan your workout!! I cannot stress this enough, if you don't plan for it, you won't do it.
• If you have an hour every second day penciled in for physical activity you are way more likely to do it. I plan what days I am going to work out/which day I'll do what every Sunday. However you do need to be flexible, I had a run planned earlier this week that I didn't get to do because of injury, but I substituted some light cardio biking/weight training instead. Being fit and healthy is about learning to plan properly.

My Heart Story

Hey There Lovelies! It is officially February and you know what that means?! Heart Month!! It is heart and stroke month which is very dear to my, well, heart. As many of you know I underwent open heart surgery in June 2011 So February is going to be a "heart themed" month, where I wear my heart printed pieces, lots of red, pink and feature some fun DIY's i've been finding over the past little while!! But since some of you are new around here I will explain things a bit more.

  I found out I had a congenital heart defect called a "Coarctation of the Aorta" which means my aorta was too narrow. The doctor's attempted to put a stent in it but the first attempt in May 2010 tore my Iliac artery and they had to replace that. During the second attempt in August 2010 they lost the stent in my abdomen and had to perform an emergency laparotomy to find and remove the stent.


My laparotomy scar augusut 2010, and then august 2012
During this surgery a line that was in my arm in order to monitor my blood pressure caused my brachial artery to collapse. So in January 2011 the doctors took a vein from my leg and replaced my brachial artery in my arm. Which is why I have a "no blood pressure cuff" tattoo above that scar now, because a blood pressure cuff could cause that artery to collapse again.
Scar from brachial artery replacement, and "No BP cuff" tattoo January 2013

Finally on June 22 2011 I had open heart surgery through my back to remove the piece of aorta that was too small and they replaced it with plastic!! It was successful and we had no complications.

My thoracotomy scar December 2012

I am so lucky to be in a place with access to amazing health care, doctors and amazing staff at hospitals where I had surgery and recovered. I had a lot of bad luck, but some good luck too, as things could have ended up much worse than they did. So, campaigning and raising money for the Heart and Stroke foundation is incredibly important to my family and myself. Without the research done, and amazing advancements in technology my life could have turned out much differently than it did. I would really appreciate if those of you who feel inclined to do so would donate to the heart and stroke foundation, I have online donation set up Here
xJennaD

Home sweet home & battle wounds round 4

Hello loves! I am finally home, I got released from the hospital yesterday and am so so happy to be home. It's really quite a lot easier to heal at home thats for sure. I have to sleep in my brothers room because I am not allowed to use stairs and have to be supervised haha, but my parents recently redid his room and bought him a huge comfy bed. Pretty happy about that!

I was supposed to go home on monday but on my way to get an echocardiagram I blacked out, my blood pressure fell ridiculously low and my vision went black and I couldn't hear. It was so scary!! I had never blacked out before, so obviously I thought I was dying. Which is funny now in hindesight. They figure I was just dehydrated because they plopped me back in bed, hooked me up to a ton of IV liquids (magnesium, potassium etc) and I felt much better. Every day I get a little bit stronger and stronger, which is good, the pain will subside less and less. I get to go on walks around the block and everyday they'll get a little longer and more frequent :)
I have I think 3 presurgery outfit posts that I can update with in the next week or so, I have missed everyone! But it will be a little while for new ones, I think. I'm just taking it easy! Thank you for all your wonderful words of encouragment by the way, you are all sooo great.

xJennaD

Pictures of my "battle wounds":

This ones kind of nice because it follows the line of a racerback tank top perfectly! It curves around just to my side before my breast starts. As you can see here my shoulder is quite swollen, which is normal

update

hello my dears, i am still in the hospital (writing this on my blackberry haha) but just wanted to let everyone know that the surgery went really well!! finally! i am so relieved. so i can work on recovering and not have to worry about more surgeries. they ended up removing half of one of my ribs to gain access to my heart, but thats okay, didn't need it anyway? haha. anyways i'm finally eating solid foods and will hopefully be back home monday afternoon. thank you for your wonderful comments, i have such great people in my life helping me through this!

xjennad

Piece of my heart

Hello lovelies, I am off to have my heart surgery bright and early today (be at the hospital by 530am) and I would like to thank you all for your support, it really means a lot. I will be missing you while I am in the hospital and won't be posting/commenting for 5-7 days while I am in recovery there. I'll try to see if bryce will post perhaps to give an update on how everything went. I will miss everyone and look forward to being fixed, healthy and back ready for action!
love, JennaD

Battle wounds round 2

Here are some photos of my newest battle wounds to add to my collection. I had the staples removed on monday and I feel much better and more mobile now that I no longer have them. Im no longer walking like an 80 year old (more like a 60yr old...) I've had lots of lovely visitors and my family has been great getting things for me if I need them. I went out for dinner last night actually with two of my best female friends who are both moving at the end of the week, one to BC and the other to Calgary both for school. I will miss them a lot, but it was nice to have dinner together one more time! Anyways here are my battle scars, and I look forward to how ridiculous I'm going to look in a bikini now....

Love, JennaD

No more staples!!
When I had my ugly staples

Heart Ache

Okay so here's the scoop, a year ago I was having my yearly physical and my doctor said she heard a heart murmur and sent me to go have an ultrasound on my heart. I had to wait until july last year to have this done and the results came back that everything was fine. Then in November I fell ill with Pneumonia and the doctor at the hospital heard the same thing and sent me for another ultrasound on my heart along with another ECG, this time the results came back that there was something there. I had to be referred to a cardiologist in january, who sent me to have an MRI in febuary. Then in March he told me I had a "coartation of the Aorta" which means that my Aorta is narrowed in a spot, which causes my blood pressure to be much higher in my upper body than lower body. It's congenital which means I was born with it, and it's odd that they only found it now, but also a good thing they found it. It's not inherited from anyone and is a mutation, yeah just what we all thought....I'm a mutant. Haha, this is what it looks like:The narrowing goes from 18mm, to 8mm at the narrowing then back up t0 19mm. It's symptoms include: headache, cold feet, high blood pressure, cramps in leg muscles, inability to excercise for long periods of time. Funny thing is I barely had any symptoms other than the first three, I have played soccer for 8 years and work out 3-4 times a week as well. This amazed the doctors, but they told me they had to do somthing to fix it or else it could cause serious health problems, and basically before i was 40 would I would have a stroke, heart attack etc. Not fun, so on April 23rd I met with a surgeon at the University hospital and he said they would be performing a "stent" which is seen in the first picture, they snake a balloon up through your femoral artery up to your heart which expands your aorta and then put the mesh cage in place which keeps the muscle expanded. It's a very simple procedure performed very often, and results in only a week recovery time, so we booked it for May 18th, they wanted to get everything done as quickly as possible. So this past tuesday I went to the UofA hospital with my parents a little tired, scared and nervous but with the hopes that it would be "a piece of cake". Unfortunatly there are things that can go wrong with the procedure although they don't happen very often, but, they happened to me.

I woke up after my surgery at around 1:30pm, with them explaining to me that in trying to get the catheter in my iliac artery and up to my heart they had torn the artery and needed to send me to a different hospital where they had a very good Vascular surgeon to operate on and repair this artery. I was confused, partly from the anesthetic and partly from fear. So we waited for the ambulance that took us from one hospital to the next, and there we waited for the word from the next surgeon. I was in a lot of pain with a pressure bag pumping into my iliac artery to keep me from bleeding out. When we met the surgeon he told us what had to be done. They were going to have to make an incision across my abdomen and one horizontal by my groin so they could get in and replace my Iliac artery with a piece of plastic, gortex to be exact (yeah the stuff they make raincoats out of). The recovery for this one would be about 5-6 weeks, I was obviously upset, but my mom, dad, brother and boyfriend were all there holding my hand and telling me I'd be okay. So around 730pm I was rolled into the operating room, knocked out with the anesthetic and 3 and half hours later I awoke in the recovery room in a lot of pain. All I wanted was to see my family, but I had to wait for an hour to make sure I was okay. Thankfully the doctor said this operation went very well and they fixed my artery. Around 12:30am I was wheeled back to my room and greated by my worried but loving family and boyfriend. I spent the next three days in the hospital, in a haze of morphine, pain and nausea. On the 19th I got my own private room and had about 8 or 9 visitors, my friends, family and man were wonderful and made me feel very loved. My parents and younger brother and boyfriend were there everyday, and my mom slept over on the 20th because they took my catheter out and I needed help in the night getting in and out of bed. My older brother from Vancouver called me several times and was texting me constantly to check up and make sure everything was going well too.

They also took my bandage off on the 20th and I was greeted with a scar about 7inches long across my right side, from my belly button to side. It's healing quite nicely and has sutures so I'll be left with a very clean nice looking scar. I'm not too concerned about having a big scar, even though I've been working my ass off on my abs, it's going to be kind of badass, and I'm probably going to make up silly stories about it. "Yeah I was in mexico and someone tried to steal my liver" haha that was a good one. I also have a smaller scar vertical about 3 1/2 inches long along my groin, poor vagina. I got to go home friday the 21st around 2pm, and was relived to go.

Here's where my Iliac artery is:

Im sleeping in my younger brothers room because it's upstairs and my rooms in the basement, I can't really "do stairs" yet. It's going to be a long recovery but hopefully everything will heal nicely, and 4-6 weeks from now I will be up and back to my normal life. Anyways, I'm bruised from all the IV's and needles and sore from my scars, so hopefully I'll be able to post later on. I may even put up a picture of my scar, so I can see how much progress it's making weeks from now. Hope everyone is having a MUCH better week!!
-Jenna D