Staticfree Blog

The MRI went well this morning. If you've never had the honour of having an MRI, the idea is simple: put you in a giant magnet/electromagnet and tinker with radio waves. It's a big, scary machine which they have to give you earplugs for, as the various magnets in it are very noisy. Of course, being so big and scary, they have to put you smack in the middle of it (and there's barely room for more than you in the middle).

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.