A frog in the chest
On February 14th, I woke up with a weird feeling. Something wasn’t right and it took only a few seconds to realize that I had a bizarre heart beat. As someone else put it, it felt like having a frog jumping in your chest.
We went to St John’s Health Center, in Santa Monica, as it is only a few blocks away from our place. I remember the frustration I had when we circled around trying to find where to park the car.
Even sick, I will not yield to these parasites that have become omnipresent: valets; I can park my own car, I don’t need some guy that can’t speak English to do it for me. In this case, Sibylle dropped me to the ER and went to park the car.
The process in the ER was very fast and they took care of me in a matter of minutes and found oud I had an atrial fibrillation, which was soon diagnosed to be caused by lack of sleep and too much caffeine. It is a state in which your heart is not synchronized properly and the top and bottom part don’t work as a team anymore. It is not dangerous in itself but can have nasty side effects. According to the doctors in the ER, they see this every day…
The Reset
There are several ways to reset your heart back to its normal sinus rhythm: Medication, Electric shock, and a … more natural approach.
The medical team told me they had two medications of choice, the first one being very safe and totally unpleasant could yield an instant result, while the second one required close monitoring.
We started with the first one which was essentially pump medication fast in your heart and immediately flush it out by pumping saline solution. It has to be one of the weirdest feelings ever: it feels like your chest is suddenly filled with tingling cold water that rushes to your kidneys! Well, that sucked and it didn’t work.
The slow medication was working its way and got my irregular 180 bpm down to an irregular 120 bpm while an obnoxiously loud monitor would confirm to the staff I was still alive. I did the math and I think I heard ‘BEEEEP’ about 50, 000 times that day.
So, what is the natural way that allowed me to escape the electric shock? Stimulation of the Vagus nerve, which can be done as simply as … using the toilet!
Sarah Connor?
The Terminator was spotted by Sibylle as he walked right in front of my bed. I was like ‘nooo, you’re dreaming’, but, then, I saw Maria Shriver walk by a few times too. Turned out their family had an emergency of their own.
the suite
I eventually got transferred to the suite! Imagine a hospital room with a kitchen and a second room equipped with couch, table, TV, etc. And I’m not talking small stuff, but living room size furniture.Life at the hospital sucks, but this room was better than many people’s places (sad, but true).
After a few days, a nurse came by and told us she had some bad news: someone had reserved the room. I wondered how one can ‘reserve’ a specific hospital room and the idea the Terminator used his influence to get the room for his daughter crossed my mind; but this wasn’t the case.
I was kicked out of a nice room and put with a guy that didn’t seem to speak much English but liked to enjoy TV at a deafening level.
In the meantime, my old room, a few doors away, had a constant body guard and a no visit sign. Turns out I got kicked by Nancy Reagan. She had no condition, but got the best room to stay in observation. If I had married Ronald instead, I’m sure I’d have kept the room; seems to matter more than your condition.
After whining and complaining, I got transferred to another part of the building which was much nicer and got eventually released to the outside world.
Blind monitoring
I was hooked to a wireless heart monitor 24/7 and it was like trying to sleep with a squid: there’s always a wire/tentacle in the way of your comfort. I don’t even know how effective this is: my monitor’s battery died as indicated by the display in my room. As no one seemed to care, I went to the nurse station to check on the guy supposed to watch over everyone’s heart beat; he hadn’t even noticed mine had disappeared from the monitors!
50 words a day
My cardiologist probably went to the wrong seminars and learnt how to optimize his time rather than talk with patients. He would stroll in the room, tell me in less than 50 words that I would not leave today and turn back in a futile attempt to reach the door before I could utter any question.
Trying to deal with your patients in less than 50 words per day is quite a challenge, but practice makes perfect and we had a champion right there; he had the routine down so well that answering a question would appear as a a disturbance in his schedule.
According to his bill and the time spent with me (which I did track), his time is worth about $3000 per hour and each word has a valud of $4. Not bad…
Free, at last
I finally got released. The feeling of freedom is something you can truly appreciate only after loosing it temporarily. At the end, I was even missing the gasoline smell of the streets of Santa Monica. I guess I’ll write soon about life without caffeine!
