10 weeks out from open heart surgery: Heartburn!

The surgery was successful, but it left me with an irregular heartbeat and a rapid heartbeat.  This can happen. But these conditions also mean I need to continue to take Warfarin, a blood thinner.  While on Warfarin I bleed easily, which means that many of our activities (some of our cycling and almost all of our hiking) isn't possible because I could bleed excessively if there was an accident, and help would be too far away.

The first thing I tried was called Cardioversion.   It consisted of administering an electrical shock to my heart--sort of punishing it for misbehaving.  That was effective, in the short term (like all punishment), but the Atrial Flutter and rapid heartbeat returned in five days.  So it has to be classified as a good try but a failure.  It was disappointing.

So, a month later I had was is called Ablation.  The Cardiologist inserted some tubes (BIG tubes) into my leg and threaded them up to my heart.  Then he punctured my heart with one of them and entered one of the upper chambers.

There he could "see" the electrical impulses and where they were going awry.  What he did was use an instrument to destroy part of my heart to create scar tissue.  Then, the impulses needed to go a different direction, and that direction was the healthy one.

Then he did whatever he could to try to make my heart beat irregularly so that he could test whether he had finished the job.

It was a success, although 5% of the time the condition returns.  Wish me luck.

All of this still makes my head spin.  Parts from a cow, a plastic tube in my artery, shocking my heart to make it behave, and then entering my heart and killing parts of it.

What a miracle.

I have every reason to believe that if I die within the next few years it will not be from heart problems.  I will need to take my chances with everything else, like all people my age do, but I am no more likely to die from heart problems than anyone else who did not have defective parts.

Vicky has been here through all of this, every step of the way, taking care of the things that I am too incapacitated to take care of, suffering through the fear and the distress of watching me in pain.   I am determined to make this pay off for her.

A miracle.