Just survived heart attack at age 38, follow up to Phil's post

[b-boy]

maldorf first off you are in my prayers bro, and i hope everything with your heart checks out fine and there is no damage. and second i really want to thank you for your post and telling your story, there have been some damn good post in this thread and this thread has really made me think alot.

my recent blood work didn't fair too well, i have to go back in a couple of weeks to get my liver enzymes checked again cause i can't work around vinyl chloride at my job with elevated liver enzymes, and getting blood work right now while im dieting is really sucking for me
my hemocrit was high my LDL and HDL were both low just like you.. wow scary as hell bro!

 

[maldorf]

Damn MAL, that is one hell of a story. I am glad you are here to tell us all about it. This is an eye opener for many. We all take things for granted and our health is usually one of them. Just because we look great does not mean we do not have underlying problems. And of course at 38 the last thing on your mind would be heart attack. Maybe it is time to get 6 monthly checks instead of yearly. But the question is would it have made any difference? since other than HDl reading low there were no other indicators. One thing for sure.........this sort of thing makes you sit up and think.

MAL, Glad you are still here among us bro. You are a good man!!

Yes, I wonder if any more checkups would have made a difference. The biggest negative test result I had was the high hematocrit but once I got it down I assumed I was ok. Cardiologist doesnt think it had anything to do with the heart attack, but I wonder.

 

[maldorf]

Have a few buddys in the ground because of heart failure. One's actually next to my moms grave. Everytime I go see Mom,I see him,and can picture him pounding away at the slag iron. Didn't make 40 yrs...sure makes me wonder.
Best wishes on your recovery........GF

More common than we think perhaps.

 

[maldorf]

dammmmmnnn.. man. thats some scary stuff. good thing you survived through it. good luck man. /you were only using aas for 8 years?? were ur cycles crazy/??

Not really that crazy considering what ive seen on some guy's posts about their cycles. In the last year I was doing very reasonable cycles I would say. there was some time I experimented with short burst cycles where you run higher doses but youre only on for 4 or 5 weeks then off.

 

[maldorf]

If i might comment on this.

Ive always thought people put so much confidence in blood work and in some cases thats rightfully so.

My cholesterol has always been low, my LDL low, my HDL average, hema average etc etc etc

About a year and a half ago I had been pounding bacon and buffetts and eating really crappy for about a month straight......very unlike me because im usually pretty robotic with my diet and eat the same things every day every week....but when i go off my diet or take a break training....I really want to indulge in what i havent been eating and this was one of those times.

I went in for blood work 1.5 years ago after this binge and my blood work was awful......and I knew it was pretty much from the binge but regardless I found it highly unnacceptable....especially my HDl which was way too low.

So I designed a regimen for myself using supplements that went after all the problems I percieved by that one bad blood work (including liquid caps Vitamin D at 6-8 grams a day) **broken link removed** among a slew of other supplements that ive talked about on this board before........60 days later i had blood work done again and it was stellar and my HDL had jumped up an unbelievable amount.

I felt with all the stories Ive seen online with people saying "and i have had regular blood work and everything was fine" yet still suffering health problems....that this wasnt good enough.

So I ante'd up and paid 1400 dollars for a body imagery scan at a highly regarded center here in so california....MRI, CT, Ultrasound....the works.

This was by far the best money Ive ever paid. These doctors went thru everything in my upper body with a fine tooth comb.

She went thru all the results with me for an hour and a half, gave me all my imagery disks and even told me things I didnt know I had wrong with me.

My cardiac score? Zero. She said she never has seen a man my age 39 with a cardiac score of zero. I have zero plaque in my heart and surrounding vessels and she spent an hour on my carotoids and found zero plaque. My heart was incredibly healthy function and structure wise with blood flow. Very slight LVH but right in the guidelines of an athlete.

Liver, kidneys, intestines, colon etc etc etc all in excellent condition.

This is how thorough these physicians were.....

She asked if I ever worked in a hazardous environment or had any very bad lung infections.....in which i replied yes to both as I had worked around silica sand back in the day for about 4 years and also had some bad bronchitis infections back in the day (not in the last 4 years though due to my supplement regimen for my immune system....been sick once in 4 years, small cold and it was when i went off the beta glucans)

The physician had found a ultra tiny piece of scar tissue or polyp in my lung, so small it had to be magnified many many times just to make it out but it was in there....and I was told "it most likely is nothing but i want to check on it in a year to make sure it hasnt grown----right now its iota of a pinhead but lets just make sure it stays that way---i think its nothing but lets take a look at it in a year"

She saw that my disks at the bottom of my spine were slightly slipped and compressed and that I needed to keep an eye on that (which i knew and a chiro fixes me 2x a month)

And she says "see this? you have a slight hernia on the left side here down in the lower abdominal region....just be careful" ----something I also knew but never thought they would pick up.

Ill tell you this.....getting this full imagery done gave me better peice of mind than any bloodtest could ever do and I really cant recommend this enough.
I wouldnt wait until something bad happened to get onboard with this stuff. My business partner who is 31 went in for a full imagery and they found out he has a defective leaky valve (2 flaps instead of the 3 flaps we all have-bicuspid) and he has to have open heart surgery in his 30's sometime to replace this valve.

I just see this board and other bbing boards online depend greatly on bloodwork and hell thats 10x better than getting no bloodwork which a great many bbers do.....but why not take it a step further and get the full imagery workup from a highly regarded firm?

Question for Maldorf because I have a theory Ive been throwing about as of late......how is your sleep apnea? nonexistant or existant?

thanks for the great post. I will look into the vitamin D now, hadnt thought about that. Wondering what dose to use, probably best to consult my doc on that? Sounds like the vit D level in my body can be tested?
As far as sleep apnea, I have never been diagnosed with it but I suspect I may have some minor issues with it. I have woken up during the middle of the night with that feeling like you cant breathe, but this has only happend maybe a single handful of times during my life. I usually wake up feeling refreshed as long as I get to bed early enough, I have a habit of staying up too late. Sometimes I dont sleep so well if my allergies are bad, my nose swells shut because its so irritated. I was using one of those over the counter nasal sprays for years but got off of it in the hospital. I dont need it now and I have been sleeping a lot better.
What symptoms do you look for to indicate that you might have sleep apnea?

 

[maldorf]

I am very glad to hear that you are doing fine bro.


I have never put much faith in blood work, although I get a full check up once a year ( EKG, blood ect.) but none of that stuff means jack if you have no idea that your arteries are blocked!!!!!! It's all a guessing game otherwise.

Yeah, only way to know for sure really is to have an angiogram and that isnt done on the drop of a hat. It is rather invasive. They have to insert a large catheter in your femoral artery. Once they are done you cant move for 4 hours, have to lay in bed flat. After that you cant lift more than 10 lbs for 1 week. They had me pumped full of so much heparin, an anticoagulant, that I ended up bleeding more after the site had been closed off for 2 days. Big giant hematomas that the nurses have to push on with all of their might. they smash them down so that they are absorbed, talk about pain! thing that really sucks is I had the one angio done and after they finished and pulled out the catheter I felt more chest pain come on. they decided it was best to go back in so they had to tap in to my other leg to have a look. So I ended up with two legs that were black and blue from my groin all the way down to my knees. You dont even want to know what my groin looked like. Lets just say that it was so swollen that it looked like an elephant trunk!

 

[maldorf]

I've been reading this forum for a while, but have only joined to chime in here. Please excuse my butting in, but I feel strongly about this and want to help. There is a lot that can be done to check your heart. Unfortunately, most mainstream doctors don't perform these checks or recommend them or maybe even know about them. I am not a doctor, but have been looking into this to make sure I do what I can to avoid getting a heart attack (just turned 50). I also don't know what age it's a good idea to start this at, but if you are taking risks, you might want to do it regardless.

My main source where I got plugged into this was Dr. Davis' site: www.trackyourplaque.com . You can google info to find other sites as well.

As DC mentioned, very important to have a heart scan. (You can get a heart scan without the full body scan, if funds are tight.) What they'll do is give you an overall score AND the percentile you fall into for your sex and age. A score of 10 or less is considered no risk. People can have triple digit scores. Any score can be reduced to lower your risk, by taking appropriate action.

The heart scan detects plaque which is built up inside the wall of the artery. This type of plaque can rupture which then causes a clot to form resulting in the heart attack. This type of plaque is NOT the same as blockage detected by a stress test. That's the reason you have people who have an incident not long after passing a stress test (e.g. President Clinton & bypass surgery, Tim Russert & death). The plaque does not block the artery and cause symptoms. Your heart can pump like crazy lifting heavy iron or doing cardio and you think you're OK because you feel fine. (Think runner Jim Fixx, for those of you old enough.)

Blood tests are important, if you get the right ones. Some things to test:
HDL
Vitamin D
Triglycerides
C-reactive protein
Homocysteine
Fibrinogen

LDL is important, but not how you get it on most tests (LDL, HDL & total). There are different LDL particle sizes and it's the small LDL that's the real problem. Niacin can be used to reduce the amount of LDL and raise HDL. The no-flush varieties are useless. Niacin can stress the liver, but from what I've read, 500 mg is OK for the majority of people.

Besides Niacin, other things that help are: raw almonds, pectin powder (pectin is the stuff in orange rinds), raw walnuts, fish oil, fiber (Metamucil), oat bran, and cutting back on wheat products. (At the extreme, Dr. Mercola recommends dropping all grains.)

Dr. Davis recommends statins to get cholesterol very low in order to reduce plaque scores. Some are against statin use. (Is it big pharma again? Are there side effects, etc.?)

Making headlines more recently is the importance of vitamin D - maybe more important than all other factors. See: **broken link removed**


Blood pressure - it should go without saying, should be under control. I'm skeptical about lower recommendations (<120, <80). Is it just big pharma trying to sell more drugs? On the other hand, Dr. Davis reports that people in remote African villages have a BP around 90/60.

There's also BMI, but my guess is that the community in this forum is not considered in that analysis. On the other hand, some do hold the idea that weight, be it muscle or fat, is a risk. I don't know what the answer is there.

Sorry about the length of this and again, I apologize for butting in as my first post. I hope this info will be useful to some.

Nice post, thanks for the info.

 

[maldorf]

Ive read your posts for about 2 years now. Here and on other boards. You have always cared and looked out for everyone's best interests. Im sorry this has happened to you at such a young age, however, Im glad your back. Take care, bro.

Thank you for noticing the posts I have made over the years. I like to think of all of us as a family. Most of the public out there thinks very little of bodybuilding and the things we use to excel in it. It is our sharing of thoughts and experience that allows us to learn. We dont get much support from the rest of the world.

 

[syntheticmuscle]

Thank you for sharing your story with us. I'm sorry you had to deal with this but at least you are here to deal with it. Be safe bro, you will be in our thoughts and prayers

 

[maldorf]

Bro Maldorf
WOW! I have been on vacation and been off the board for a while. I am VERY sorry to read your posting. I am glad you survived!! And your message is very clear to me. I am 55 this year, more muscular than ever and get all those comps that we all have to have about size, but your message makes me think about what I am doing to myself (AAS and GH) and what my heart looks like inside. Thanks to you, I am going to a cardiologist next week to get a complete workup so I know it is ok to continue or what.

I wish you the best in the future. I know how dedicated you are to the sport......we have PM'd over hte years. I can only imagine how you feel about your bodybuilding future, but maybe now it is not really that important to you.

Thanks for making me think there is more than MASS in life!

Much respect, my friend
MikeHeavypecs

I used to place bodybuilding as a very high priority in my life. I think now though I will be able to move on and concentrate on things that are more important. I realize that being a mass monster just wasnt my fate, and that sometimes you just have to accept what mother nature has given you.

 

[maldorf]

i dont blame you one bit bro just focus on being a better husband & father to your family cause when its all said and done thats all that matters...thankgod you survived it could of been a hell of alot worse always tell yourself that,near death experiences are no joke & shouldnt be taken lightly keep them eyes wide open to the big picture bro...

Sometimes its so hard to keep your eyes open to the big picture when youre so busy concentrating on what youre going to do tomorrow. I now feel so mortal. I did some light squats this morning and was scared the whole time. Wondering if things will ever be the same physically as well as mentally. Only time will tell. I jsut hope that I dont end up like so many others, having another heart attack a few years from now.

 

[maldorf]

maldorf first off you are in my prayers bro, and i hope everything with your heart checks out fine and there is no damage. and second i really want to thank you for your post and telling your story, there have been some damn good post in this thread and this thread has really made me think alot.

my recent blood work didn't fair too well, i have to go back in a couple of weeks to get my liver enzymes checked again cause i can't work around vinyl chloride at my job with elevated liver enzymes, and getting blood work right now while im dieting is really sucking for me
my hemocrit was high my LDL and HDL were both low just like you.. wow scary as hell bro!

Yes, my HDL and LDL were low. Hematocrit was off the charts back in January. It was 62. I got it down by giving blood so that it was only 50 when I had the heart attack. I have read that hematocrit can be raised like that when you have either a heart or lung condition. I am now thinking that my hematocrit was high because I had something already going on inside that coronary artery. Just a hypothesis.

 

[OuchThatHurts]

Gotta say first that I'm just glad that you're alive and healthy. I mean, heck, it really hits home because you're just a bit older than I am. I agree with mikeheavypecs. I'm going to see my doctor and get a more complete workup. I want to know what's going on.

You said it was a clot. Well that crit number is HUGE! wow. I was 54 once and my doc said that was way too high. Do you know how your heart looks plaque-wise? You're lipid don't seem that bad.

Definitely a wake up call for me too. I only sorry to have to read about a good man's misfortune before I wake up from my little fantasy world.

Thanks for sharing the info and best wishes to a very good recovery.

Late

OTH

 

[Test_Eagles]

Wow massive haematocrit...even though it probably wasn't the cause, good you took steps to get it down.

 

[OuchThatHurts]

Yes, my HDL and LDL were low. Hematocrit was off the charts back in January. It was 62. I got it down by giving blood so that it was only 50 when I had the heart attack. I have read that hematocrit can be raised like that when you have either a heart or lung condition. I am now thinking that my hematocrit was high because I had something already going on inside that coronary artery. Just a hypothesis.

Definitely possible. How about your blood pressure? If your crit was that high, that usually means a lot of red blood cell mass. If your BP was normal than your plasma was way low. If your BP was high than you could have had plenty of plasma just way too high RBC's. Are you a big fluid drinker? I mean, lots of H20? Giving blood was definitely a smart move. Do you think it was just too late?

 

[michelin]

powerful stuff

Thanks for sharing your story and good luck with whatever road you take.

 

[w_llewellyn]

To the OP, I wish you a speedy and full recovery.

FWIW, I strongly believe that the general attitude toward steroids on both sides (media anti-steroid, pro-steroid) needs to be adjusted towards the middle. What I mean is, the media portrays a ridiculous message about steroids, destroying any credibility. The pro-steroid community tends to go the exact opposite, that steroids are almost perfectly safe. The reality is somewhere in the middle. These drugs are acutely (short-term) very safe, but when used for years most certainly can increase the risk of heart disease.

I have been around these drugs long enough to know that they can and sometimes do lead to early death if abused. Heart disease should ALWAYS be a concern in the back of your mind when you are taking these drugs, and you should try to minimize the negative impact on cholesterol with diet, exercise, support supplements, and intelligent drug choices. FWIW, orals are the worst for cholesterol, and should probably never be taken if avoidable.

 

[Smiler51]

I'm glad to hear that you are well bro and wish you that everything turns out well!!

Moreover, I hope that many people will learn from your experience, especially the younger crowd as myself, and think about the risks they take just to be big and lean, as it will affect their future.

 

[maldorf]

Gotta say first that I'm just glad that you're alive and healthy. I mean, heck, it really hits home because you're just a bit older than I am. I agree with mikeheavypecs. I'm going to see my doctor and get a more complete workup. I want to know what's going on.

You said it was a clot. Well that crit number is HUGE! wow. I was 54 once and my doc said that was way too high. Do you know how your heart looks plaque-wise? You're lipid don't seem that bad.

Definitely a wake up call for me too. I only sorry to have to read about a good man's misfortune before I wake up from my little fantasy world.

Thanks for sharing the info and best wishes to a very good recovery.

Late

OTH

DOnt know about the plaque really, and that surprises me that my cardiologist has not brought that up. I am going to inquire into that in our next meeting in 4 weeks.

 

[maldorf]

Definitely possible. How about your blood pressure? If your crit was that high, that usually means a lot of red blood cell mass. If your BP was normal than your plasma was way low. If your BP was high than you could have had plenty of plasma just way too high RBC's. Are you a big fluid drinker? I mean, lots of H20? Giving blood was definitely a smart move. Do you think it was just too late?

My BP was normal, 120/80 or under. I drank between 1 and 2 gallons a day of water so I think I took in enough. As far as hematocrit doing damage, the doc seemed to think it had no effect since I had it down to 50 or less the past 3 months. He talked like if it were the hematocrit, the heart attack would have happened fairly rapidly and not months down the line.
They did have to pump me full of water via IV at the hospital in order to get my BP up. After the heart attack my bp was like 65/40 or something nuts like that. When I was admitted to the hospital I weighed a lean 225 lbs and when I went home I was 252 lbs! I pissed that all away within 48 hours and was back down to weight. You should have seen my legs and feet, I almost had freakin cankles.