Staticfree Blog

On a more fun note, i get to wear a cute little wearable ECG recorder. The device monitors the last 30 seconds of my heart in a continuous loop. when i press the little red button on the bottom, it freezes that loop and starts recording an additional 60 seconds. it can store 4 "events" of 90 seconds each, which then gets transmitted - real time - via phone to the company that maintains the devices via a little pizo electric speaker when the "send" button is pressed. it's sorta modemy, but without the need of an acoustic coupler as it's not really digital (or i hope it's not. it certainly doesn't sound it).

Oh, and i get to wear it for a month (got a week or so down already). thankfully, it's just an event recorder, not a monitor. that means i can take it off when it pisses me off, or when i need to do things like shower or sleep.

A couple amusing things about the operation: the table broke. After they put me on the operating table, got me partially sedated (enough so i remember and could talk), and wired up, they determined the table was stuck on one axis. So, they called in a technician and had him replace the missing bearing (or whatever it was) and continued on. Always good to have techies on hand :-) Also, the defibulators were stickers. They put one big sticker-electrode on my front, and the other on my back. Gives a whole new meaning to the term "sticker shock" ;-)

I'm back on Atenolol. It's an under dosage, but who knows - maybe it will help some. With such a small dosage, and such infrequent incidents of tachycardia, it's hard to tell.

As for recovery: I'm pretty much back to normal. Except for two bandaids near my groin (where they inserted the catheters into large arteries and veins), and one on my wrist where the IV was, i'm rather unscathed. Life goes on.

The next step is to put another halter monitor on (wearable ECG recorder) which is designed for longer-term use. The idea is that it records an ECG for a small amount of time, and continuously overwrites that data until i press a button on it. It'll then write the recorded segment to memory, and monitor for a few minutes after i press it. That way, it will (hopefully) record some tachycardia or other abnormalities so they can be further analyzed.

Thankfully, they had a cool breeze flowing through the middle, so i could just close my eyes and pretend i was laying on a beach with my dear while loud electromagnets buzz and pop around me. Ok, so it took a lot of imagining. The most work i had to do was hold my breath while they imaged my heart, so i managed to get a tiny bit of rest in it.

After the MRI, i got yet another blood test (thankfully done with a butterfly needle, which is less painful and smaller than the one that went straight to the tube [which i had the day before at my primary doctor's place]). Much more doctor bouncing ensued, and i got around to finishing up my reading of the principia discordia. What an enlightening book.

Tonight i stop eating anything after midnight. Tomorrow, the fun begins and I go in at 11:00 or so for the operation. All the stuff going on recently, the MRI and whatnot, is a precursor to determining if i have SVT, VT, or some other flavour of arrhythmia.

In order to make the diagnosis, they put me to sleep and put catheters in me. With them, and a bunch of electrodes, they'll poke and prod at my heart, trying to induce the tachycardia. They can then monitor what's going on electrically as well as monitor the blood flow via some dyes. If they determine it's in fact SVT, that means that there's most likely a pathway that electrically connects chambers of my heart in ways they shouldn't be connected (sorta a short-circuit). They could then find that pathway and using RF ablation, essentially burn the pathway out. Hopefully, this is the case and they can treat it with the ablation. If not, VT is much more confusing than SVT (as there's more variety to the causes of it) and more things would have to be tried to manage or get rid of it.

Hopefully, things will all go well and I'll be able to post a followup to this tomorrow after the operation. We shall see.

after the MRI tomorrow, i'll get to have a much more invasive exploratory surgery the following day. i'll write more on that once i find out about it.

Three and Four
More, MORE, MORE!

Five and Six
Will this fix?
seven, eight, nine
your place or mine?