And It Ends With A Whimper

It started a dozen years ago on a run with friends around Fallen Leaf Lake. I found myself struggling to the point I couldn’t run. I had to sit in the dirt.

It continued over the years, interfering with my life ever increasingly, until earlier this year I finally decided enough was enough. It was time to get something done.

It peaked in the last month with an ablation, subsequent infection, and an observation of something abnormal.

It “ended” yesterday with a catheterization that determined that the abnormal heart wall activity is a big, fat nothingburger. And that’s a burger I’ll take every time. Not like a bacon burger. Keep those things separate. That’s a situation where the whole is far, far less than the sum of its parts.

Cath Day began with a chilly walk from my hotel to the hospital. Gotta say, I’m no longer built for temps in the low 40s°F/below 10°C —especially in June. Maybe shorts were a bad idea? I fended off frostbite and made it to the hospital. Check in, and get to pre-op. Where they once again shave me. The cath goes through the arm, and the other arm gets the IV, so I said to go ahead and shave both. May as well match. I’d cleared the forest on my chest the night before in anticipation of EKG leads being attached. I was right in doing so. The agony of hair removal with glued-on lead attachment removal was…removed.

In a surprising-to-me move though, they shaved my groinal (yeah, I made up that word) area. Why? “As a backup.” Sure. I think Tami just had a thing for making me look like a sleek, fat, hairless porpoise. Which is what I look like now. A hairless porpoise. At least above my legs. I still resemble a tallish hobbit from there on down.

Wheeled into the cath lab, and I get my cocktail of drugs for the conscious sedation. I don’t know about conscious, but sedation is true. Call me Blobman. The mix of Versed and fentanyl put me into an utter fog. I really don’t know if I was awake or not. I remember feeling the feelings in my hand they told me I would feel. I don’t remember much else, until they told me to shift back onto the gurney. I seem to remember waiting for them to start the procedure. Apparently while they were doing it. Good drugs are good, man.

In recovery, they used this cuff to keep pressure on the incision, so, you know, I don’t bleed out, spurt, spurt spurt.

It’s got a valve where they can gradually reduced the pressure while keeping an eye on the how much it might be bleeding. Pretty cool.

Five hours after arriving in the pre-dawn, I was ready to go. They wouldn’t let me walk back to my hotel, and I was watched like a hawk until I parked my butt in the back of an Uber. Nurse Ratcheds indeed! In retrospect, I shouldn’t have walked anyway. I felt doped up for a couple more hours. Dopier than normal that is. My default state is pretty dopey anyway.

I spent the rest of the day doing a whole lotta nothing, other than arranging my stays and my exfil on Wednesday and watching a few shows (Mobland, Dept. Q). Back to the land of street tacos I go. I don’t plan to return to the land of my birth until I have to for a follow up echo in six months or so. Maybe then I’ll address another (non-cardiac) issue that is not impactful, but is becoming annoying. We’ll see. It’ll be cold then, so may or may not be willing to stick around long enough.

Be kind and take care of yourselves. If you can, care for someone else, too.

Slang, out.

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