Eight years ago I had a heart attack. Nothing to dwell upon but my Cardiologist taught me some of the fundamentals of reading an EKG waveform.

SWMBO some years later was suffering from an A-FIB condition. I took her to urgent care. While I'm waiting the nurse comes out into the waiting room and says that SWMBO wants me in the room. The urgent care doctor was visibly annoyed that I was in the examination room with SWMBO.

After things had settled down with SWMBO's heart, the EKG machine was started again and was printing on single A size sheets rather than a long roll of paper. The doctor picked up the latest one and looked at it. She placed it on a tray and I picked it up.

At this point the doctor is livid and can barely contain herself. The EKG printout showed the amplitude of the wave forms quite different between the older waveforms and the most recent one. As I'm looking at the EKG I said to the doctor, "All the wave forms look very good. It seems odd that the Q R peaks are 25% lower than on this edge.", pointing. All of a sudden the doctor's demeanor changed and she hurriedly explained that it was just the way that the machine printed the waveforms.

Later SWMBO told me that after I looked at the EKG, the doctor's attitude toward her really changed.

It gets better.

About a year later I went to my Cardiologist and thanked him for teaching me the basic fundamentals of the EKG waveform. I relayed the above to him. He laughed so hard that he had to wipe his eyes.