So I thought i would post here and discuss my journey…I am encouraged by several folks on here like Agetron and desertshores…i have learned a lot reading about their process.
I had a stent put in my heart last Wednesday as I had 80% blockage in my LAD artery (commonly kow as the widowmaker) so I am going to journal what i am seeing as I go forward and some reflections on my journey on how i got here
So some details about me…
I am 59 years old…6’ and 195 pounds waist 34"…my exercise program has been walking with dog daily for around 45 minutes to an hour…Orange Theory twice a week for HIIT…and strength training twice a week…but let’s face it that is what I aspire to do and i still work and travel a lot and that is my goal and i do the best that i can and if I do 2/3 of that each week .
I have had high cholesterol since i was in my 20’s I didn’t really manage it nor manage my diet until maybe the last two years when i got a new doctor that got serious about it. I have been on a low dose of Atorvastatin for 20 years but it didn’t really lower my LDL a lot and to be honest i didn’t really follow it or track it much until a few years ago. I have alsways been pretty activd but not as consistent with regular exercise as I should have been…i would go on a tear for a while and then get distracted, etc. maybe get motivated to train for a 10k or a hiking trip or something or feel like my weight had crept up and get on it but not a steady disciplined program. I was also on TRT from about 2010 until 2020…but i went off as i felt it really just made me puffy and while I had good energy and it probably increased my libido i wanted to try going without it…so anyway when i got my new doctor in 2021 I went off TRT and switched to Crestor and then added Zetia…that brough my LDL down and i have had no side effects at all from the statins that I know of…I understand a lot of folks on here are anti-lipids but to be honest I am not going to go against my doc on trying to get my lipids down…I do have family history of heart disease, my uncle having an early heart attack, then quadruple bypass in his 70’s, my mother having had a pacemaker and lifetime of high cholesterol, high blood pressure and triglycerides…having said that they ended up dying of other things in their early 90’s and mid 90’s. My dad died at 92 with Alzheimers.
So I am fortunate to have a doctor who is aggressive and willing to do things and try things. I have taken the Grail test, the blood test for cancer detection and that is negative and i plan to repeat that every few years.
My doctor had me do a CT scan and also calcium scoring this fall and my score was 154. That put me in the bottom 20th perentile for my age…not good. She then had me do a CT Radiograph with dye right before the holidays, her thought was let’s see if your calcium is a little bit all over the place or if it is all concentrated in a big blockage…the doctor reading it called her right after i left and said that i had a “50-70% blockage of the LAD”…rest of my arteries were pretty good…my doctor sent off the scan to a company named Cleerly (Cleerlyhealth.com) which does an AI enhanced analysis of the CT scan. That analysis said it looked like 58% blockage of the LAD.
I am lucky to have a good friend at Mt Sinai who is a cardiologist that deals with this…he looked at the scan and said yes, there is something there but the gold standard is to go in with a catheterization and actually measure how much blockage is there as scans are not perfect and sort of subjective…he then got me in to do a heart catheterization last week which is the gold standard to see what is really going on
Well, he went in and they did the measurements and discovered that i actually had 80% blockage in that one area but that the rest of my arteries did look good. he put in a Everolimus Eluting Coronary Stent to open the blood flow back up to superhighway status. Kind of cool that i have rapamycin in my heart now.
The bottom line is I feel great, he wants me to go back to my exercise program after a week…the biggest pain is from my wrist where they went in…and probably my psyche from realizing that i am not bulletproof.
When i started with my new doctor over the last year i have lost 25 pounds with my exercise program and my diet…I am fairly keto, pretty much totally avoiding carbs and mostly just eating meat and vegetables…I also intermittently fast and take my meals between 1 pm and 7 pm if i have two or i just have one meal in the evening. That diet has helpd me feel good as well as lose the weight. Having said that my diet is probably higher in fat than some would say is healthy but it really seems to be working for me. I have a lot of red meat and a lot is pasture raised from a friend of mine who raises cattle and elk and venison that i harvest myself.
My rapamycin journey started last spring when a friend told me to read LifeSpan by David Sinclair. I was really hooked and became very interested in reading and learning about longevity. I started off by trying to match his regiment of NMN, Resveratrol and Metformin. When i talked to my doctor about Metformin she suggested i research Rapamycin as well. So i started on 5 g of Rapamycin weekly, NMN supplements from Elysium Health as well as a few other of their supplements, Matter which is B6, B12, Folate and EPA fish oil, a vitamin K/D combo pill, as well as Format which is their immune support supplement which has Vitamin C and a bunch of other things. I also took CholestOff which is a plant sterols and stanols and occasionally also MetaMucil for fiber.
So I was feeling good…my partner was entertained, she was making fun of me for my stack of supplements and off label meds.
Then in early summer 2022 my PSA which had always been at or below 1.0 jumped up to over 5. I ended up getting an MRI and my local hospital felt like it was clearly cancer and wanted to poke 12 holes randomly in my prostate to do a biopsy. My doctor and i weren’t comfortable with that and did some research and found the Busch Center in Atlanta who I highly, highly recommend if anyone has prostate issues. They did an incredible job doing a new MRI, there were some suspicous areas and they did an MRI guided biopsy rather than just randomly biopsying my prostate like swiss cheese and they discovered that it was not cancer…they suspected it was prostatitis and put me on a regiment of antibiotics and it went back down and has remained below 1.
While all of that was happening I stopped taking rapamycin and my other supplements as I was worried that i had started too many things at once and I wondered if maybe my PSA going up had to do with something related to that…so i decided to stop rapamycin for a while and the metformin for a while and just take a few supplements like the Basis and Matter and Cholestoff and get back to a good baseline…
I do think a lot of the weight I lost last year was during the three or four months i was on rapamycin as it seemed like my weight all dropped the first half of the year…but maybe it was diet, maybe it was better exercise, maybe it was going off TRT…maybe it was the stress from hearing the word CANCER…who knows…i just had too many variables all changing.
To add insult to injury after I received my CT Scan saying i had blockage in my heart but before I could go to Mt Sinai to learn more I got COVID…grrrrr…it was my first time getting it and i am fully vaccinated but we did have a huge Xmas party/engagement party for my son with several hundred guests and i greeted every guest at the door and probably hugged half of them and I came down with Covid two days later.
So now i am 7 days out from getting my stent. I have really fresh and quite good bloodwork but now i have a whole set of meds.
aspirin 81 mg daily
Crestor 20 mg daily
Ezetimibe 10 mg daily
Repatha Pushtronex 3.5 ml shot monthly (a PCSK9 inhibitor to really lower LDL)
asprin 81 mg daily
Toprol XL 25 mg daily (beta blocker)
Brilinta 90 mg twice daily (oral anti-platelet medication to prevent clots to be taken for a year to keep your body from forming clots around the stent)
So I am going to go back to taking Rapamycin 5 mg.
I am trying to decide if I want to go back on my Metformin.
I am trying to figure out if i should take Fish Oil tablets in addition to the Elysium Matter…can one have too much Fish Oil/EPA…in other words just rethinking all of my old supplement stack and decide if i want to take anything more or not…
After reading about it on here i have ordered from Life Extension their Arterial Protect combo French Pine Bark and Gotu Kola supplement. Hopefully this may keep me from getting more plaque in my heart.
At the end of the day I belive that my blockage had built up over a long time. I am happy that what i have has been dealt with. It seems that for whatever reason i am a person who converts cholesterol to plaque in my heart so now i need to take some interventions to try to keep cholesterol low, arteries healthy, etc. etc. so i don’t build new blockages.
So would love to hear any thoughts folks have about supplements i should consider. Thoughts about my journey etc.
I have detailed blood work as well but i would say that i am very normal on all my levels now…my free testosterone has stayed in a normal range most recntly at 569 after stopping TRT, my AST and ALT willl sometimes be borderline high in the 50’s but then will also then be normal…I drink rarely but wonder if i have tracked well if i had drank before those tests where it is higher as it is not consistently high. My doctor is not worried about my liver unless those numbers were to get very high.
My AIC is 5.4. My HDL was 57. LDL most recently was 55. My ApoB was 62. LDL-P was 982. My CRP was .7 mg/L
So if anyone read to here I thank you. I think writing all of this was sort of like therapy for me.