See Andrea Run

June 12 seemed really far away when I first learned of the Donate Life 5k. I was sure my goal of running a mile straight was achievable. I secretly hoped I’d be able to run the full 5k but opted for a more modest goal. Theoretically, I thought, a young and otherwise athletic person should be able to run at least a mile ELEVEN months post-transplant.

But things don’t always go as expected – I can certainly attest to that. For a variety of reasons my exercise has progressed more slowly than I’d hoped and running a mile straight remains a lofty goal.

It’s a loft goal yes, but one that I’m fully committed to making a reality in a few short weeks. I know I can do it if I can drum up some serious support! Here’s where you come in.

Do you run? If so, please sign up to walk/run with me! (There is a $25 sign-up fee.) You’ll be supporting me and all future recipients of life-saving transplants in New Jersey. The more people I have jogging [slowly] beside me, the better the chance I have of running that full mile!

Are you loud? A bunch of cheerleaders near the end of the race would move mountains for me. Just picturing cheerleaders helps me push for an extra minute on the treadmill, so imagine the power of a real live cheering section!

Can’t make it in person? Please make a donation of any size to our team! The NJ Sharing Network (also known as Donate Life New Jersey) is the organization responsible for raising awareness of organ donation in this state, matching donors with recipients and facilitating contact between the donor family and transplant recipient. Needless to say, I’m extremely passionate about this wonderful group.

Like t-shirts? You’re in luck. Commemorative team (See Andrea Run) t-shirts are in progress…more to come!

Aside from returning to work, this is my biggest post-transplant milestone thus far. Please help me achieve my goals of raising $1500 for this critical cause and running that full final mile on Sunday, June 12.

The event takes place at 10am in New Providence, NJ. Click on the link below for our team site and look for the buttons that say “donate here” and/or “join this team”.

SEE ANDREA RUN

With your support, I can do this and we can all help raise awareness of organ donation. THANK YOU!!

Winning...Part Deux

First – to belatedly follow-up on “Winning” the first, I am happy to announce that Eva Cauble (oddly another Eva C. winner but I promise a different one!) won the AHA Cookbook challenge for healthy eating tips and recipes! At the bottom of this post is her delicious-looking recipe for homemade granola and the other tips I received. Thanks to those who participated!

No offense to Eva or you other contributors, but what I’m SUPER excited to announce is the fact that I just ran TEN MINUTES straight! This is three minutes more than my previous best and gets me within spitting distance of running a full mile straight, which is my goal for June 12. I have signed up and created a team for the June 12 5k for Donate Life, and I will provide full details very soon. In the meantime, rest assured that I am continuing to push myself. Some work-outs are great, others are brutal – I continue to try to identify trends among the good ones. I think I’ve landed on 1) an empty stomach, 2) plenty of sleep and 3) ensuring my HR is over 120 and climbing before starting to run. Stay tuned for details on the June 12 5k!

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Healthy Granola

3 cups old-fashioned rolled oats (not instant)
1 cup sliced almonds
1 cup sunflower seeds
1/2 T ground cinnamon
1/4 t salt
1/2 cup grade A dark amber syrup
2 T butter
1/2 cup craisins
1/2 cup dates
1/2 cup chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 325. Mix together the first 5 ingredients. In a small bowl, stir together the syrup and melted butter. Pour the syrup mixture over the dry ingredients, coating the dry ingredients well. Spread this mixture onto baking sheets (greased or lined with parchment paper) and bake for 30-45 minutes until golden brown, stirring occasionally. Add the craisins, dates, and chocolate chips or whatever dried fruit combination you prefer.

Cookbook Tip
Ellie Krieger (The Food You Crave and So Easy) – healthy, delicious and super easy to make

General Tips
1. Track food intake throughout the day – one free resource is a tracker at www.mypyramidtracker.gov
2. Use a rolling 10-day average of how well you’ve maintained healthy eating habits, this way you won’t have to suffer so much guilt if you cheat or stray one day!

BetterU Week Two: Ignorance Is Not Bliss

I’ve made it through my first week of the BetterU program. Today is the first day of week two for me, so I’ll fill you in on how week one went and what’s going on this week. For those of you who have joined, I hope you’ll post about your progress in the comments!

My week one goal was to be active for 10 to 30 minutes each day. I did it for 6 out of 7 days last week, and I think that’s a pretty good start to a BetterMe. I exercised right here in my apartment 3 of the days – pounded on my quasi-heavy bag (yes, I know this is not a normal thing to own!) and just generally bounced around for 10 or 20 minutes. I went to the gym the other three days and even did my full 9-minute run once (45 minutes on the treadmill with three 3-minute intervals of jogging). All in all, I had an active week, thanks to the motivation I got from BetterU.

Week two is all about reducing risk factors for heart disease, which begins with knowing what they are and which ones you have. I happen to be very well acquainted with my own risk factors, and I encourage you to identify and reduce yours. The main controllable risk factors are as follows:

High Blood Pressure – Smoking – High Cholesterol – Physical Inactivity – Obesity or Being Overweight – Diabetes

If you don’t know what your blood pressure is, find a drug store that has one of those chairs with the cuff. Normal is 120/80, anything within ten or twenty points either way is probably okay. If you don’t know your cholesterol, talk to your doctor about having some simple blood work done to find out. If you don’t have a general doctor, find one! In the case of heart disease factors, ignorance is most definitely not bliss.

The point this week is that there are little choices we can make every day to reduce our risk for heart disease. With that in mind, I set the following goal for week two:

While on 3 days of business travel this week, I will choose to avoid sweets and desserts.

Now, you may be thinking: Isn’t this girl diabetic? I sure am, but I cheat and squeeze sweets into my diet sometimes. On top of this tendency, travel is synonymous with unhealthy eating in my mind. For some reason, I’ve always allowed myself to indulge while traveling. On trips like this, there are always sweets and snacks lying around, begging to be eaten. There are fancy dinners, which seemingly everyone finishes off with decadent desserts. Not this girl, not this week. Wish me luck!

Stay tuned for the winners of the week one contest – I will announce two winners as soon as I figure out what the prizes are :)

Why you should sign up for the program with Go Red For Women:

The Ugly Truth: Heart disease is the #1 killer of women age 20 and over, killing approximately 1 woman every minute.

The Good News: About 80% of heart disease is preventable.

What We Can Do: 90% of women have one or more risk factors for developing heart disease – together we can reduce this number drastically!

How BetterU Can Help: Research shows that women who Go Red are more likely to make healthy changes in their lives.
• More than 1/3 have lost weight.
• Nearly 50% have increased their exercise.
• Six out of ten have changed their diets.



Could You Be A BetterU?

The last several days have been less than ideal for me. I went into the hospital the mornings of Thursday and Friday for iron infusions. I was nervous about side effects but really excited about the prospect of soon having more energy. It was expected that iron followed by another medicine would boost my hemoglobin and increase my energy – a very welcome change.

Thursday morning was fine. I was really nervous, but the whole visit was completely uneventful. The nurse found my vein with no problem and had the iron solution flowing within an hour of my arrival. I left feeling fine and went into work for the afternoon.

Over my nerves, I waltzed in on Friday morning thinking more about my impending business trip than any potential problems with the infusion. About 75% of the way through, I became nauseated and developed red splotches on my face. The nausea increased quickly, as did my heart rate, and the splotches made their way down my neck. The nurse stopped the iron immediately, hung a bag of Benadryl and called my cardiologist. I’ll skip the rest of the details, but after the Benadryl, a bag of nausea medicine, lots of IV fluids and an hour or two of drifting in and out of sleep, I felt a lot better. Today, I’m relieved to be feeling normal again – at least as normal as I felt before Friday.

Since we’d identified the driver of my fatigue, I allowed myself to skip out on exercise over the past week or so. It was just a convenient excuse for a break, since my anemia had been present for months. I realized this weekend there is no excuse for not being physically active. Doing some sit-ups and my wannabe push-ups is better than lying on the couch. Going for a long walk is better than standing still. It bothers me to exercise without giving 100%, but I’m trying to embrace the notion of more frequent work-outs at 50%.

With this new outlook, I joined the American Heart Association’s BetterU program today. It’s the first day of spring and I’m springing into a Better Me (hemoglobin be darned)! I signed up at www.goredforwomen.org/betteru and I really hope you’ll join me. BetterU is a free 12-week program designed to help ANYONE ANYWHERE decrease his or her risk of heart disease. If I can do it post-transplant and with sub-par hemoglobin levels, I’m sure you can do it too!

Sign up by March 26th (and be sure to let me know by email – aef616@hotmail.com) and you could win a great prize from the American Heart Association! And to help maintain your commitment throughout the 12 weeks, we’ll have more contests along the way!

The program encourages goal-setting and small changes that can be sustained in the long-term. My goal for the first week is to find one block of inactivity (between 10 and 30 minutes) each day and turn it into physically active time. Even ten minutes of extra activity each week adds up to over an hour of exercise I wouldn’t have otherwise gotten!

Even if you already exercise regularly and follow a perfectly healthy diet, this program will help you become more aware of the risks and warning signs for heart disease. So even if your risk is already low, I feel sure you can learn a thing or two through the BetterU program. Please join me today!

**Note that while the program is targeted toward women, men should sign up too!**

This Friday Is National Wear Red Day!

This Friday (2/4/11) is not only the day that I fly south in search of warmer weather (and people who want to buy what I sell) – it’s also National Wear Red Day! This special day takes place on the first Friday of February each year to raise awareness of heart disease being the #1 killer of women and to raise funds to further the fight against heart disease.

I’ll be rocking my red and screaming my story (as usual!) and ask that you join me. Would you commit to telling at least two people some simple facts on Friday? Spreading information is the first step in fighting heart disease! For the record, I already have one friend that essentially converted her office into a heart disease awareness center (you da man, Dawn!) and another (to remain anonymous) who has promised to wear red undies – can you top these guys?! I would LOVE to see some fun/crazy “I wore red and_________________” stories in the comments! (For those technically-impaired, e-mail me and I will post the goods myself!)

FAST FACTS

• Heart disease is the #1 killer of women.
• More women die from cardiovascular disease than from the next four causes of death combined – including all forms of cancer.
• A woman dies from cardiovascular disease every minute.
• Only 1 in 5 women believes heart disease is her greatest health threat.

KNOW THE SYMPTOMS

Since my end-stage heart failure was originally misdiagnosed, spreading awareness of symptoms is particularly important to me so that people can advocate for themselves in the future. My story could have been very different if I had recognized my symptoms.

Heart Failure

• Shortness of breath, especially while lying flat
• Swelling due to fluid retention (often in the legs and other limbs, mine first showed up in my abdomen)
• Increased heart rate
• Tiredness, fatigue; persistent coughing or wheezing; lack of appetite, nausea

Heart Attack

• Chest discomfort (pressure, squeezing, fullness or pain)
• Upper body discomfort (one or both arms, back, neck, jaw, stomach)
• Shortness of breath
• Cold sweat, nausea; lightheadedness

I am so grateful for all of the support thus far in joining the fight against heart disease and driving awareness of organ donation. I hope you will join me in wearing red on Friday! For more information, go to www.goredforwomen.org.

GO RED!

2 + 3 + 3 = EIGHT

You know those cars that can go from zero to sixty in like three seconds? For that to happen, the car engine obviously has to react as soon as the gas pedal is depressed. Well, that’s essentially how most people’s hearts work. Your body tells your heart it needs to hustle as soon as you exert yourself, which provides you with the proper physiological support. A transplant recipient’s heart operates more like a little four-cylinder vehicle, which works fine once it’s warm but needs some time to catch up after the gas pedal is pushed. Because some nerves are cut during transplantation, it takes time for my heart to figure out that my body needs it to pick up the pace.

So while most gym-goers hop right on the treadmill or elliptical and pump it up to full speed, I need to start out very slowly and work my way up. I begin walking at a leisurely pace, then increase the speed and introduce increasing amounts of incline to get my heart moving. Because I’m only able to get my heart rate up to about 120 walking (resting is 105), my first episode of jogging is really quite miserable. However, once my heart is beating at between 140 and 155 beats per minute, jogging becomes worlds easier. The trick is to insert the right amount of walking between each jogging spurt so that I get a bit of a rest but maintain the high heart rate.

So what in the world does 2 + 3 + 3 = EIGHT mean? That’s the number of minutes I jogged on Sunday as a part of my most intense post-transplant workout yet! I felt like Rocky afterwards. I slowed my pace a little from earlier jogging efforts per my dad’s sage advice and felt much better and was able to run longer, both in terms of time and distance. I spent 35 minutes on the treadmill with eight total minutes of jogging (two minutes, then three minutes, then another three minutes). My new pace is 12 minutes/mile or 5 mph. Not exactly breaking records, but making progress!

I completed the same amount of time on the treadmill tonight, again with the 2 + 3 + 3 jogging format. However, tonight’s experience was pretty brutal. I know everyone has tough workouts sometimes, but it’s frustrating to have ONE good workout and then a bad one. It’s hard to get myself back into the gym after feeling bad, but I’ll try to keep Sunday’s Rocky workout in my brain instead of today’s crappy one. I know my workouts will become more pleasant as my body gets more and more accustomed to being pushed. It’s just sometimes difficult to transition knowing something into actually doing it.

I have a new goal, which will help keep me motivated. Donate Life New Jersey is holding a 5k run/walk on June 12, and I intend to participate. I intend to RUN. Don’t get too excited, I won’t be ready to run the whole thing by then, but my goal is to run at least a mile straight. Who’s coming with me?