Faye and Maciek's Adventures in the frosty Canadian North
Working for a wildlife department, there are a lot of taxidermied animals around. Most of my coworkers have several animals in their offices. I just got my first desk owl. It’s a bit smaller than the other office owls – I guess it’s the “junior employee”-sized owl.
Maciek has been evaluating his post-transplant cardiovascular fitness using the beep test. The beep test is a good proxy for VO²max, which measures of the maximum amount of oxygen that the body uses during intense exercise, in milliliters of oxygen used in one minute per kilogram of body weight (ml/kg/min). That makes it sound very fancy, but the beep test is essentially just running 20 metres back and forth for as long as you can.
At about 6 months post-transplant (~Dec 2015), Maciek attempted a beep test and came in with a score of around 2/8 (for a VO²max of about 22 ml/kg/min, which matched up to the actual VO²max test he did around that time). This score is considered “fair” for men over 65 years old (and “very poor” for younger men), but his medical team was pretty happy with it because apparently it’s pretty good for a heart transplantee. It was unclear from the medical literature whether his cardiovascular fitness would ever improve from this point.
He tried one again about a year later in Tulita (~Nov 2016) and had moved up to a 4/0 (VO²max: 26 ml/kg/min), which is a massive improvement of about 10 stages. He tried again in Sept 2017, and got another 4/0, so it was looking like he had plateaued.
He tried one again this week, and got a record-breaking 4/5! This is an equivalent VO²max of 28 ml/kg/min, and now that he’s 36 he gets to be in the 36-45 year old reference group (instead of competing against those speedy 26-35 year olds), so his score is up to “poor” compared to his peers (and “average” for men over 65). He would be considered “fair” for his age group if he was female, and actually his heart is likely female so that might be a reasonable comparison, as heart size is one of the major determinants of VO²max.
This bodes well for the upcoming transplant games that Maciek is competing in this summer – great job Maciek!
