Blue is not my favorite color. I’ve had blue toes, blue lips, blue disposition, but I like to be blue.

Blue is the color of my heart rate when it dips below 60 beats per minute as recorded by my Watch. Yes. Today’s crop of smartwatches can do such things. Mine uses an application called Cardiogram which captures heart rate and displays it as a nice graph.

Blue is the heart rate below 60 bpm, red is the heart rate above 100 bpm, and everything in between is orange.

I like blue because it is the most restful part of the day (naps) and night (sleep).
When my heart rate dips into blue I am sleeping better. That was the case before ALS and the ventilator I use now can provide settings which help to achieve more blue while also giving me enough air to live.

With respiratory onset ALS the diaphragm and core breathing muscles slowly weaken and eventually lead to death. The ventilator helps to prolong life in a good way.

On average, everyone’s heart rate varies. It varies throughout the day, of course. But it varies with sleep; average being somewhere between 60 and perhaps 90 bpm. My wife’s overnight heart rate is almost a solid blue.

If it were not for the snoring I would be a bit envious of all the blue that shows up on her Cardiogram chart.

Pulse oximetry— those little oxygen meters doctors stick on the end of your finger— also show heart rate and blood oxygen amounts. My rates are 94 to 97 while resting and 98 to 99 with any sustained movement.

The weakened diaphragm means I’m slowly losing volume in my voice.

That makes me blue but my wife seems to think of it as a blessing.

That makes me blue, too.