My G.P. shares the concern of the E/R doctor and the anethesiologist. My mitral valve is making a weird squeaking noise that he has not heard from my heart before, and he does not know what it means, so he is sending me to a cardiologist.
I have had really pretty good health for many, many years... it is beginning to feel like everything is going downhill. I have long had a desire to retire, so that I can do things that really matter in the area of public policy, but the collapse of interest rates and fall in the stock market starting in 2008 have delayed this, and delayed this, and delayed this. There are times that I suspect that as soon as I reach the point where I can do stuff that really matters on a full-time basis, I'll die.
UPDATE: Interesting article from New England Journal of Medicine (1951) about the squeak. It sounds like it is a sign of a significant but slowly advancing problem. This article at WebMD indicates that mitral valve prolapse (different from the stenosis mentioned in that ancient NEJM article) is apparently not a terribly serious problem, and lists a number of symptoms of "mitral value prolapse syndrome," some of which I have (shortness of breath, tingling in extremities, in my case in my hands, although I thought that was tendonitits). Most significantly, it mentions that it runs in families, and my daughter also has a heart murmur.
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