DIY oxygen treatment? Just in case the NHS runs out.....

[Fred]

I do sometimes get missed beats that I can feel.

My physician who I havent caught with an error yet, unlike my GP, says that that is normal and nothing to worry about.

[Paul]

What the graph represents, is a measure of blood flow. Which is driven by pressure. This makes the graph, even though of blood flow, a measure of pressure too. Sometimes you can notice a correspondence between what the graph shows and how you're feeling - without using your separate blood pressure meter. Some of the ripples in the graph would represent turbulence in your circulatory system.

It suggests the pulseOX might have one LED light source, but on the receiving side has a receiver array, and that's how (like a computer mouse), it can "see" blood flow. By comparing what each pixel sees.

As a practical example, normally my sitting heart rate might be 60 BPM. Sometimes when I use the blood pressure machine, it happily reports "your BPM is 180". And of course I'm not running a marathon, so that's not possible. The reading would always be exactly 3X the correct value.

When I fire up the PulseOX and look, there are three peaks on the waveform. And that clever blood pressure machine has taken the first derivative of the waveform and spotted the blips in its math, and counts the three peaks in its BPM count.

So at least now I know where the blood pressure machine erroneous readings come from. There is something real and physical that is happening, at the time. And I probably don't feel "100% correct" at the time.

I've never had a chance to do a PulseOX when the angina shows up. It feels like an electric shock, at the pulse rate, and there's one slight incline I go up when out for a walk, where it might show up. In terms of intensity, all I can say is "you can't miss it". It's that annoying.

My favorite quote from the doctor is

"you could drop dead you know"

The doctor is great at the double entendre. I've not been told what the symptoms would be like, leading up to "dropping dead". So I can be wearing the right hat at the time.

Paul

[Mogs302]

The intake air is deprived of much of its nitrogen before feeding into the cannula.