In later posts, I will outline my plans and everything I need to do before I leave and other attendant issues.
Right now, I want to share the story of my latest adventure with the medical industrial complex.
Well, I had a bit of an adventure last night and unfortunatly missed
hanging out with some good friends of ours to watch Louisville in the
Orange Bowl. It also caused me to have the medical industry inflicted
upon me.
Every since I was a child I have these 'spells', (pronounced sp-ells',
for you Yankees). My heart races really fast and feels as if it's
going to pound out of my chest. When I was young, I could just stop
moving for a minute and things would settle back down. As I've gotten
older, it's become harder to get them to resolve, but I can usually go
lay down and be quiet for 5 or 10 minutes and things are fine.
Last night, just as I got down to Lisa and Greg's house, one came on.
Try as I might, I couldn't get it to resolve. There were also weird
descrepancies with the usual spell. It kept acting like it was passing
but then would come back and it was starting to give me a pain under
my collarbone.
Anyway, after about an hour and 1/2 of this (around 7 or so), I
finally decided to go let the medical community inflict itself upon me.
This was no easy decision. For one, I was afraid, I get in there and
it would resolve right away and they would still keep me to run tests
and monitor, etc.
In the end, it was the right decision. When they got me on the
monitor, I was spiking at a 185/190 heart rate and my blood pressure
was up around 145/90, which is quite high for me. I usually run at
about 110/70 or even lower. They had me try some manual things and it
wasn't going away, so basically they gave me a 'soft reboot'. They
injected me with adenosin (sp?), which makes your head and chest feel
really full for about 10 seconds and then, voila, within a minute,
everything was back to normal. They also gave me some super
beta-blocker to further lower my BP, but after that everything sunk
back into boredom and ennui until they let me go home about 9:30.
Two good things, (I guess?) came out of this: I finally have a name
for my spells, which is SVT, which stands for super ventricular
tachicardia, (I'm gonna stick with spells) and my cardio Dr. finally
has hard proof that something is happening. Most docs, ya know, are
loathe to believe anything they can't see in black and white and blood.
Mostly, it's a scary thing that comes and goes, albeit, sometimes with
help, but really is no big deal. Today I'm fine, everything is fine,
nothing to see here, move along.
