Cardiac Status Update

 

Back on the first of August in 2018 I began a nightmarish journey with my heart. No, not some bullshit romance but the flesh and blood organ occupying the center of my chest. In the ungodly late hours of that hot and humid night my heart decided to go into ventricular tachycardia.

Stupid me didn't realize I was in deep poo-poo trouble and it took a nurse working the night shift as well to discover why I felt like crap. By that time my heart rate was pushing way over 250 beats per minute.

After this nurse pushed me down on a stretcher she and her crew rushed me to the Emergency Department where a team of scared doctors and nurses worked to prevent me from slipping in ventricular fibrillation. That's pretty much when the heart says, “fuck it, I'm done.”

Some drug whose name I have forgotten got my irate ticker back under control, for that moment. But that was just the first of several close calls with ventricular tachycardia (VT).

 The surgical treatment for that condition is called cardiac ablation where truly talented doctors insert a catheter into my groin and feed it up to my heart. At the end of the catheter is either an electrical probe which burns short circuiting heart cells or a device that can freeze them dead.

All told I had four ablations with the last one performed down at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) in Charleston. See, I had a particularly nasty set of short circuiting heart cells with a couple in extremely difficult spots to reach. The doctor at MUSC was going to crack open my chest to a certain degree to reach those troubling buggers but unforeseen difficulties forced him to try another approach.

Well, he nailed those bastards and with the help of a cardiac resynchronization device (CRT) implanted in my chest, I'm almost completely normal. My heart behaves, mostly, but I have to be watched and monitored on a regular basis.

Well, last Friday I got a call from one of my cardiologists and I have a nifty new issue. My CRT started detecting my heart going into atrial fibrillation, which brings its own set of problems for my continued existence on this pale blue dot.

So this Thursday I've got to report to the hospital up here in Columbia for a session of cardioconversion. Electrodes will be placed on my chest and, after they knock my ass out, I will receive shocks to my heart to restore proper operation.

Supposedly, it should take more than twenty minutes where they will then wake my ass up and send me home. There is a possibility of an overnight stay for observation and I truly hope I can avoid that bullshit.

So if you were wondering why I didn't get anything posted Sunday, that's pretty much the reason. I still did a few must-do chores like using my new John Deere riding lawnmower to cut the weeds in my yard. So I'm not a complete bed-ridden loser.

Mostly, I feel fine but I do sweat like a nervous pig when I do most any activity. I will be taking Friday off from work and being totally lazy over the weekend so I should have something to post during that time. If I wanted to get stupid I could do a review of the Snyder cut of Justice League. A four-hour long remake of the absolute worst film I ever paid money to see.