Wow ! An elephant sat on my left chest yesterday. The pain spread down my left arm. I mashed on my chest and waved my arm. I tried to lay down and tried to sit down. I thought I was going to die. This episode lasted 15 minutes. Now I have a cardiologist. Going through tests. Probably was an angina signalling some form of heart disease.
My BP was 159/100, very high, during the event. I am 58 yrs old. Only a little over weight. But I am diabetic, so the whole thing is even more complicated.
Hi Robert17,
I’m sorry. I hope you are ok.
So scary. At 66, I have had a couple times when I thought I might be having a stroke. They weren’t, but that’s my family history on both sides…Glad you are getting yourself right to the doc’s. We may complain about their relative ignorance on dealing with our diabetes, but their schooling spends a lot more time on various heart conditions!..Take care—and please keep us posted…
sounds like a heart attack, they will probably do a scan and whack a stent in. it’s all simple stuff now, no opening up the chest. My dad had another stent at 94. out of hospital the next day.
time to get a copy of your blood test, what will freak you out is if you have high blood fats/triglycerides. the best way to reduce them is to eat fat.
I hope you are feeling better. Please keep us posted!
How scary! Please let us know what they tell you. I worry about this happening all the time. My thoughts and prayers are with you.
Thanks for all the thoughts and well wishes. That is nice. The blood tests have not come back yet. Two days after, and my left chest is still sore, right under the bottom of the rib cage on the right.
My older sister had a heart attack some years ago, so now she says it is hereditary. Hers was a build up of plaque. She did have surgery. I don’t know all the details but she is thin and exercises a lot. Hers was a surprise.
I must lose weight. I must exercise more. I take one 81mg Aspirin per day. All this would be fine but I hate my boss. So the stress is sky high. I have to travel all next week.
Another problem is I love to eat really rich food. I cook gourmet meals for myself and my wife. We love it. For an accompaniment to dinner, I am making Rosemary and Parmesan Rolls made with yeast and white wine. Just pour some white wine into the batter. Yum.
My diabetes and now my heart thing and my angry boss and my gourmet food thing.
Update : according to the tests there was no damage to my heart. I am grateful. The x-ray shows liquid inside my chest cavity. I have not finished my visits to the Cardiologist. More exams to come and a stress test.
The doctor was talking about the big picture and said that diabetes is a major threat to my health. Even in the face of all this, the big D is a major threat to my health.
Happy to hear your cardiac enzymes were WNL (within normal limits)! Keep on keeping us posted, please.
Such good news, @Robert17! This made my day! Great news and what a relief!
My wife and I love to cook too - but in the past 10 yars we have made big changes to our diet - and still eat very well, albeit in a much more heart-friendly way. Simple changes have gone a long way. For instance, among many other examples::
Of course, we hardly every buy processed foods and cook everything from scratch.
I know I’m going outside the orthodoxy on this one, but… really good extra virgin olive oil actually has a higher smoke point than canola oil. Bizarre, but true… So if you’re just doing high-temp frying and not trying to save money, it’s actually worth using olive oil… completely different sort of experience! If you need truly high temp (> 405 C), you can always use peanut oil, which is also heart healthy. Extra light olive oil is higher smoke point yet, and avocado oil has the highest smoke point of any edible oil. Then again, noone can afford to fry with that stuff…
I read this article a while ago, and tried to replicate its findings, but I had a hard time doing so. Here is the story. A few years ago I decided to pick standard cooking oils to keep at home. I did some heavy research. What puzzled me was that there were different smoking points listed for extra virgin olive oil in different articles (including this one).
So I set up an experiment. I bought three different extra virgin first cold press olive oil bottles, that were in the middle range of costs. I defrosted and fried a pair of turkey sausages in a pre-warmed 8" stainless steel pan on medium burner (it is a single position on my Wolff range), using these different olive oils and canola oil. The result was that, in all cases, the canola oil browned more and cooked faster than the olive oils. Therefore, the canola oil had a higher smoking point than any of the olive oils I had picked.
I still occasionally use extra virgin olive oil to do limited frying at intermediate temperatures - but I figure that the high-smoking point olive oils must be on the very expensive end.
I have thought of using light olive oil for frying as you suggest - which does make sense from a temperature point of view. But, since light olive oils are chemically extracted (while extra virgin first cold press olive oils are mechanically extracted then mechanically filtered, supposedly with no chemicals used), I have always been a bit leery of them:-)
FYI, on a related subject, there is some research that shows that many extra virgin olive oils are adulterated, or their provenance “wrongly” listed. Costco olive oil is one of the few that have not been found guilty of either, and that’s what we use for most uses except when we want to do a special dish where the olive oil stars, such as Caprese salad - in which case we use an expensive, single-source olive oil.
Yep, my experience has been similar. We get olive oil imported from Italy through Costco, and I’ve actually found it has a higher smoke point than canola (which we can get locally). I actually have some of the issues you do with Canola… almost all Canola is chemically extracted using hexane.
And yes, I’m pretty sure 90% of “extra virgin” OO available in the US is actually a mix of other oils, which is why I stick to the Greek and Italian stuff 
I’m not that worried about hexane extraction, but I have had better results with EVOO. I’ve not actually tried light OO, but I’ve had excellent results from peanut oil, which is what we used growing up (I’m from the East Coast).
Which brand is it? I would be interested if there is a reliable supply of high smoking point extra virgin olive oil at hand - especially from Costco:-) you don’t mean the regular EVOO Costco bottles, do you? In my home fry test they showed up as having lower smoking point than canola.
Surprisingly I tend to trust Costco truth in sourcing more than most other places:-)
Nope, we get one of the two following (order for delivery, not sure they have it in warehouse):
From Italy: Civetta
From Greece: Myrto
Myrto is definitely darker, and more “olivey” than the Civetta. Civetta is better suited to cooking. It’s definitely pricey, but we enjoy the hell out of both of them. We also have an olive oil importer in town we occasionally get small-batch stuff from.
Nice find! We’ll definitely try the Civetta!
For really good tasting olive oil we typically buy local CA extra virgin olive oil, grown and extracted locally - it has become a bit of an industry there. We spent many years in NorCal before moving to WI so we are familiar with the CA local providers.
@WestOfPecos, @David49 do you guys have air fryers? I got one for Christmas— at first I was skeptical but now I’ll tell you I couldn’t survive without it…
Goodness gracious, a kitchen gadget I have never heard of - it shows you what teenage kids can do to a man. I don’t have one - but now that you have mentioned it, i must look into it!
What do you like best/worst about it?
Likes:
1)Damn near everything you put in it comes out crispy and delicious
2) uses minimal or no oil and is presumably healthier (who knows)
3) user groups on Facebook exchange outstanding recipes/ good ideas, and cautions about ideas that turn bad
Dislikes:
This air fryer sounds a lot like the oiless turkey fryer that we have used to cook our last two Thanksgiving turkeys. This beast will cook a 12 pound turkey with nothing touching the turkey but a wire basket and air.
