The Power of Positive Thinking and the Severe Limitations Thereof. . .

[elf]

Well, I suppose I called it upon myself. Never again shall I utter (or type) the words "His heart has been treating him well" consecutively and in that order. I swear I curse him just as soon as I do.

I'm not looking for advice; I'm confidant I know what we've got to do (after all, I've been through this before, and it took manymany attempts to find the right approach, so I've had my fair amount of practice..). I'm not really looking for sympathy (well, maybe a little)... I guess I just need to ramble on a bit and jump up and down and cry at how it's just not fair. I know I've put little snippets of this up here and there, some of it recently... so please bear with my redundancy.

Some bunch of years ago, my husband started to notice that his heart would *kick* him every now and then. He was in his early twenties when he first noticed it, and then he was about... oh, 24 when we found the pattern: if he was tired and stressed, he could count on his heart kicking him a few times over the next day or so. I told him, “I wouldn’t have married you if I knew you were defective!”

Soon after that (1994), he started having regular "bad heart days". Once we realized that it was more often than once every two months, we figured he better get it checked out. This started the seemingly endless line of doctors who would tell him, "You're fine. Stop doing cocaine." (Yes, I'm exaggerating - none of them *actually* accused him of doing drugs, they would just ask him three or four times during a single visit) No, he didn't do any drugs. Not even pot. They couldn't find a problem. By the time we got to the doctor's office, his heart rate would be perfectly normal.

<b>Diagnosis</b> (1998)
So one day, he calls out sick having another bad heart day, and I leave for work. Around ten in the morning, he calls me up, literally in tears because he broke his tooth. Befuddled, I ask him, "you broke your tooth?" He replied, "Yeah. I blacked out in the kitchen, I fell and I broke my fucking tooth out of my head". Ohhh, he didn't slip. Nonono, he Blacked Out.

Off to the hospital we go. I drop him off at the ER entrance, and go park the car. When I walk in, I see him sitting there holding a paper towel to his face.

"What the hell are you sitting *there* for?" He should have been brought right in. His heart was racing and arrhythmic. He was as white as a sheet.

He says, "I told the nurse I fell. She took my name, and told me to sit down." Exasperated, I head over to the nurse. "Uhm.. Excuse me?" I gesture back at him, "He's having some heart problems. That's why he fell." Oooh, the nurse looks back at him and nods. Next thing we know, there's a wheelchair and he's being pushed over to the admitting area. The nurse over there asks him, "So what brings you to the hospital today?"

He rolls his eyes, “I was born here, I figured I would come here to die."

At which point I smacked him, and I'm sure the nurse would have as well if it weren't against policy. She hooked him up to the blood pressure thing as I started explaining the situation, and takes his pulse. She then picks up the phone and gets a gurney on it's way and an IV in him ASAP.

After that, it's all a blur. His heart rate reached higher than 300 bpm, at which point, it's not pumping blood anymore, it's frothing it. Doctors and nurses in the emergency room are supposed to be chatty people. I like it when they're chatty. I really really don't like it when they are all focused. That means that I could be a widow within a few moments' time. Nono, I like it much better when they're chatty. I can remember holding onto his toe because that was the only part of him I could reach as the doctors and nurses all buzzed around him.

So after a little while, they got his heart rate back down to 'reasonable' and they stuck him on medications. 'Well, at least now they know there is an actual problem,' I told him. And that was true. Finally, we had a diagnosis. Atrial Fibrillation. Usually happens in older people, and apparently according to the doctors he had seen already, it never occurs in younger people. Or something.

The condition is relatively simple. There’s extra electrical connections going on in the heart, where the regular impulses that cause your heart to pump are kind of lead astray by that extra connection (which really is just healthy bits of tissue in there that conduct the electricity in unexpected directions), and then your heart starts going into overdrive just trying to keep up with itself. At this point, his rhythm was never normal. He called his heart "The rabid gerbil in the ivory cage".

So he started seeing a new doctor. A specialist. Actually, it was a team of doctors, and he would never get to see the same one from one visit to the next, which was a frustration in itself - especially since he wouldn’t just TELL them that he wanted to only see one doctor. (That’s a whole nother issue, though – getting him to simply ask for what he wants - he never does it)

<b>The Procedure</b> (2000)
So we went on the roller-coaster ride of finding possible cures, some as simple as taking a pill every day for the rest of his life. We were afraid of the possibility of a pacemaker and the endless need for medications, when finally they came up with <I>the procedure</I><small>TM</small>.

The procedure was called Catheter Ablation. They go in through the major veins at the groin (fun!) with a tube that’s got a teensy camera with a laser beam attached to it. They feed it all the way up and into the heart, find the bits of tissue and zap them with the laser. Scar tissue doesn’t conduct electricity, and therefore those extra connections are no longer made.

Yay, a cure! Easy. Cakewalk.

Of course not. The doctor that the hubby liked, the one he had confidence in, the one he truly trusted, was out of town (we find this out on the morning of the procedure), and it was another one of the doctors scheduled. Ok. Whatever. Just get it done.

So he lays on the table, they stick tubes in him. With just a local anesthetic, he’s fully conscious and aware for this. He’s fully conscious and aware as the <I>doctor</I> asks the <I>nurse</I> some critical question in midst of poking around inside of his heart. Hubby started having what was later diagnosed as an anxiety attack, and told the doctor that he was experiencing pain. She couldn’t figure out how to overcome it, and actually wasn’t sure it was an anxiety attack, and so aborted the procedure.

More doctors, more tests, theories, medications & an attempt at electro-conversion (clear!) which only put him in a normal rhythm for a few days… onward with the rollercoaster effects of emotions going from elation and then falling back down to rock bottom despair. Over. And. Over. Again.

We gave up for awhile. He went on the medication that brought his heart rate down to ... oh, 40 or some ridiculously low rate. He lived in a fog, but at least his heart rate wouldn't go over eighty. At least it wasn't going to kill him.

(2002)Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore. We found <I>another </I>doctor. Dr. Goran at New York Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan. He actually knew what he was talking about. He outright said, "Wow, you’re awfully young for this sort of thing." And then he shrugged it off, commenting, "I bet you don’t want to be on medications forever, hmm? We’re going to try this <I>procedure</I>…" and we very nearly panicked. But he did things differently. HE would be the one to do the procedure. No one but him. And he’s done it hundreds of times. He spoke in Plain English to us, and treated us like actual human beings and only asked about cocaine the two times. We were impressed.

Another battery of tests, and there we were. I think it was in the spring of 2003. They made him loopy so that he didn’t care about anything… He remembers asking (during the procedure), ‘How’s it going, Doc?” and the doctor would nod at the anesthesiologist, and he would gray out again - only to wake up awhile later and ask, “Hey, doc. What’s THAT?” as he peered up at the monitor screen… and the doctor would nod at the anesthesiologist...

So, to make an already too-long story come to brief end: it was a success.

…

<b>Until now.</b> Here we go again. We're back at square one: He's got that occasional kick and it's showing itself when he's both tired and stressed. I suppose it's the healthy tissue growing around the scars and beginning to make those connections again. Why this happens when he's tired and stressed, I don't know, but this is the way it started in the beginning.

I keep hoping that once we move and settle in our OWN place again, and money should be a little of a stress-inducer in the very near future. . . ... Maybe once the stress levels are more manageable, it’ll just fade.

But... there's only so far that positive thinking can take you.

<small> I don't WANT to do this again. I don't I don't I DON'T! Goddamn it, it's supposed to be <b>FIXED</b>. </small>


*<b>Reality check:</b>*
You know... I typed all this out and got all choked up, and I'm stressed and wretched and I'm teary-eyed and pathetic... but .... wait. This procedure, it's still a success in my book. It worked for over a year. Maybe he needs just a touchup? Maybe I'm actually right, and it's just the healthy tissue making a little too much of an effort at healing inside there, and it needs to be discouraged. Maybe we won't have to go on another quest for another way to solve this. Maybe when we call the doctor (after we move, because A: honestly, it's not all that BAD right now, and B: maybe it WILL calm down afterward, and we'll have more time to deal with it, rather than panic now when we're already stressed beyond necessarily reasonable levels...) - when we call the doctor he'll say, "Oh, this does happen sometimes, just come back and we'll fix it up..."

Think positive for me?

...please?
Thanks.