I collect memories.

It’s been a year to the day since he passed, and I felt like going back here to send people to where his artwork used to be felt appropriate.

I still miss him.

I thank the world for the great artwork, the conversations we had, and the heartbeats we shared.

So this is a little bonus file from the recording session I did on that day with my friend. I mentioned in the description of the last file that he was curious about possible irregular heartbeats so I tried walking him through things like breath holds and “pushes” (I don’t know how it came to be known as that in the heart sounds community but “pushes” are what Valsalva maneuvers are called here), and this file is from me trying to get him to do one.

Here’s another recording I took of my friend’s heart. In the three years since I last got to do this, he’s had several concerns with high blood sugar and is since trying to take his health more seriously these days (and watching his weight, he’s gotten even heavier since three years ago, but not by much). It’s probably because of that that he seemed more involved with the whole recording process this time, in that he asked me if I could detect any irregularities with his heart if I did this.

I’m not a doctor, I would just be a friend who knew a bunch of things about how the body works, but I got him to do breath holds to try and get a reaction out of his heart (but not before telling him to directly ask his doctor who he already sees regularly at this point about his concerns).

Part of me was a little surprised that he went about this whole affair with more interest than I initially expected. In this recording he does about three breath holds, back-to-back. I guess I should take his word for it when he says it wasn’t a big inconvenience to him when I asked to do this. 

This was recorded around the upper part of his chest near the pulmonic area. Listening back to this really reminds me of what happened three years ago, because his split S2 shows up very well when he breathes in, especially as a reaction to the breath holds he did. It’s a sound that while is a normal thing present in a lot of people, it’s one that I associate with him specifically. It’s the sound that really tells me that it’s this friend’s heartbeat. I processed this audio relatively more heavily with compression and one additional filter so you can hear it more loudly and clearly in this file.

This is kind of a big one for me, it’s a recording of a 29-year old man’s heartbeat, but not just any man, it’s the same person from these files from three years ago. (The link does go to a pretty personal story, but that’s part of that) We still remained in touch relatively speaking since then, and recently I got a chance for us to meet up and record stuff again.

This is my 500th post on this blog, and I was hoping I’d be done with one of the two stories I’m currently working on in my drafts (both are from prompt requests), but I’ve been editing these on and off so you get this instead, not that I wasn’t planning on posting this anyway.