Staticfree Blog

The catheterization went well. I'm alive and they couldn't find anything terribly, horribly wrong with my heart. SVT was pretty much ruled out, as they couldn't find any superfluous pathways. They tried inducing tachycardia in a variety of ways with the catheters and couldn't. All in all, it turned out nicely. They now know many things it's not (thankfully so far, dangerous is one of them).

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.