Loose Laces

Here is a synopsis of what happened...

I've had an increasing heart rate for nearly a year (known only by me). Last Fri.--14th-- I came home from having some blood work done to see if anything was out of order there. When I got home, I became short of breath, dizzy and began sweating. After a little while I wasn't any better so Carolyn called 911. The ambulance was here in about 10 minutes. and my heart rate was 280 per minute. In the ambulance, it went on up top 291. They gave me a couple of shots of beta blockers and it came down to 148, where it stayed until next morning when I got more blockers and coumadin that brought it down to 98.

On Monday I was stable and they were discharging me. I had all my clothes on, but my monitor wires were still attached. The nurse came in and said let's make sure so she had me stand up and my rate went to 142 and stayed there. She said "get back in bed". They did a stress test on Tue. and I passed it easily, so my heart was found to be strong. They then decided they could stop my heart with electricity and restart it and it would be in rhythm and ok. I didn't like the idea of that! I would have to swallow a sound probe so they could make sure there were no clots in my heart. Thursday they numbed the back of my throat and were ready to insert the probe when the doc came in and looked at my monitor and said to stop and that my heart was back in rhythm and it would do no good. A minute later it was fluttering again. He said that I was in-and-out of rhythm and something else might work. He called in a heart electrician (cardiac electrophysiologist) and he said they could insert a tube through a vein in my groin and go into the upper right chamber of my heart (atrium) and cut a small muscle in the bottom of the chamber that controls some of the electric flow between top and bottom cambers. The procedure is called intracardiac ablation. So, that is what we did on Friday. My rate and bp are now normal, my feet aren't swollen for the first time in more than a year.

On Thursday morning at 4:00, they drew blood as usual. They sent it to the lab and somehow it showed my clotting factor as 2.4 which was unusual because the day before it was 4.2. Friday morning came more blood work, and it showed that it was up to 4.6, which indicated my blood was too thin for surgery. After shaving and prepping me, they spent three hours trying to get my blood thickened with vitamin K, which didn't work. Doctor then ordered two bags of platelets to be infused which took nearly another hour overall. The procedure took about three hours I got back to my room at 5:30pm after having left the bed at 7:00am. As of this writing, I am still tired and short of breath, due to the extra thick blood I am pumping. It will take several days for the coumadin to thin it. I will be on the coumadin and a beta blocker for a while, and then I should be able to live normally.

It was an interesting eight days.