This is actually a continuation of Sundays' entry... but since I couldn't post this one on Sunday, I'll post them both together...

17:51 02-May-99

Interesting day... not one that I really liked, though. Actually, I disliked it. It sucked,

I was trying to go to sleep. This was after I had tried and failed to upload yesterday's entry. Finally, I got Karen to come in and rub my legs.

Didn't work.

Later... back rub didn't work. I was just restless.

I decided to take a long hot shower... maybe that would do the trick... it was getting late, almost noon, and the trick must be done.

Standing in the shower, with the water running over my shoulders, I felt dizzy. I opened my eyes, still felt dizzy. Felt my pulse... I was having PVCs... no real heart beats. Coughed... which usually stops that stuff... and it didn't. Coughed harder, twice... it worked.

Got out of the shower, drying off... it started again. same thing, only this time I knew when it started. Fifteen beats before I could get it to quit.

Getting dressed, I debated whether or not I should tell Karen. Not much of a debate, really.

See, the trouble with PVCs, which are Premature Ventricular Contractions, is that they sometimes turn into Ventricular Fibrillation... a relatively fatal condition. V Fib is probably the easiest way to die... no pain, you would just get dizzy, fall down and die. Unless somebody was standing by with a defibrillator. Defibrillators are those machines that they use on ER to shock people. Then there would be some pain, if someone decided to use it on you.

I decided that I wanted to be around a defibrillator. Karen took a shower, then drove me in. Checked into triage, then got put in a monitor room. Mary then put in IV in my right hand... in my wiggly vein. But she couldn't get blood out of it, but no problem with stuff going in.

Dr. O'Keefe was on, and she, along with everyone else, gave me mucho shit about smoking. Yeah, yeah. She had Mary give me a bolus of Lidocaine, followed by a drip of the same.

And the weirdest thing happened... my tinnitus, which I've lived with for years... went away. Bam, it was just gone. This was the most disorienting thing that's ever happened to my head... involving legal drugs, anyway.

Unfortunately, it didn't last. It was back full strength within an hour. But... the audiologist that I had seen several years ago said that it was not treatable, it would never go away... well, I think that this means that he was wrong. Not that I think that a Lidocaine bolus is a cure... but from what was described to me about the disease, it is entirely mechanical. A chemical solution for a mechanical problem? Possible, but unlikely.

Anyway, back to the subject. My bigeminal rhythm (every other beat was bad)degenerated into a trigeminal(every third beat is bad) one, then finally to mostly normal. The cardiologist that came in to see me, Dr. Joliff, thought that it would be best to keep me overnight. This might have had something to do with the fact that they had just brought in a patient into the next room who had been found, essentially dead, at home... after he'd been released from the hospital less than 24 hours before.

And that was gruesome to listen to, too. The fellow's daughter was not taking the news very well.

A common occurrence in the ED, but Karen had never been exposed to this, and it rather upset her...

So, up to room 620-2, where I was settled in. The IV had been disconnected, and I sent Karen home, figgering that she had had about enough at this point. I called the boys, and gave them a list of stuff to bring in: some pajama pants, my slippers, the old 486-25 laptop... on which most of this was written.

The old guy in the bed next to me was a popular old man... when I arrived he had five visitors, all older women. And they were all talking at once, or at least two at a time. The old guy could get a word in edgewise occasionally. Acerbic old codger. He had been in for several days, they'd attempted a balloon angioplasty on him and failed twice (actually, they didn't fail, his arteries closed up again almost immediately...), so he was going up first thing in the morning (Monday) for a quad bypass.

At this time, I'd been up 24 hours, and I dozed off... just in time to miss the boys. They left a message on the board in my room, and I was awakened five minutes after they left.

All in all, I spent a pretty miserable night. Besides the nurses coming in and reconnecting loose leads and doing their vital signs thing, the old guy, once the ladies had left, was a prodigious snorer. Well, since I am too, we probably took turns sleeping and snoring and being awake and cussing the other guy out silently.

About 04:00, the nurse came in and told me that my heart rate had dropped to 30 for a coupla hours.

What they (the docs) think happened was that the ACE-inhibitor drugs that I'd been using since my first coronary (November 15, 1989) were not doing the job anymore. My blood pressure was way too low, for one thing, and there were obvious conduction problems. So I was given a beta-blocker about 21:00; the combination of this and the others that I had taken in the AM probably did the 30BPM thing in combination.

By this time, 04:00, the guy next to me was awake for the day... or so he thought. He was given a coupla valiums and some other drugs as pre-op drugs, and he started getting verbose and rather goofy... it was amusing. Pretty soon the ladies descended upon him, and about 06:00 they finally wheeled him out of the room, along with the gaggle of women.

And I was waiting for breakfast... and waited, and waited. They had brought me a sandwich when I was admitted, about 18:00 or so, and I'd devoured that... but I was still hungry, and spent the night hungry.

But breakfast was not the next thing on the list... an ultrasound of my carotid arteries was next. So I got wheeled downstairs in a wheelchair without foot rests, and I was soon lying on a cart with gel all over my neck. Cheryl, the US tech, told me that they would rather see me just when I called them in, and not as a patient... the carotid studies were pretty normal (for my age...) with no hemodynamically significant lesions present.

I'd had a portable chest film done when I was in the ED, and it showed that my heart size was borderline... slightly larger than the last one two years ago. Hmmm...

So, I returned to the room, and there was breakfast. Some rubbery scrambled eggs, some baked shredded potatoes and a bowl of mush of some sort. Pepper, no salt. One pack of sugar, not nearly enough to make the mush palatable with the skim milk that was provided. I wolfed it down anyway.

Karen came in about 08:30... she took the day off. After about a half-hour, I talked her into going home. My regular cardiologist was supposed to be in sometime in the morning, but it was hard telling when it would be.

So I waited and waited. Finally, about noon, Dr Joliff came in again... he'd forgotten that Dr. Meyer was off today, so I was still his patient.

He'd worked out a plan for me, and we discussed it and he sent me home. I'll stay on the beta-blocker, twice a day just in case I have any adverse effects, and I'll see Dr. Meyer in a coupla weeks. In the meantime, I need to get an event monitor to wear for a week. The event monitor constantly saves about two minutes of data, and when you hit the button (when something unusual happens) it saves the preceding data, plus another five or ten minutes. I've worn one of those before, and nothing ever happens when a patient is wearing one...

But, if something does happen, you can transmit the data over the phone and get an almost-instant diagnosis of that event. Pretty neat, huh.

Anyway, they finally got the paperwork done for my discharge, and I met Karen and we went by Walgreens to drop off the prescription. We came home and the JD and I went out to get some perforated pipe for the french drain. I got Tyler up and got him started mowing the lawn, since it's been a beautiful day, and it's supposed to rain again later this evening. Right now, JD and Tyler are out getting a truckload of gravel for the drain and Karen is picking up my script and some other stuff at the drug store.

And when Karen gets home, I'm gonna take my pill and go to bed. I've got an appointment with the sleep study doc tomorrow, and we've (the boys and I) got a lot of stuff still to do before we head out to Oklahoma... so I need to get somewhat energized here.

So... more tomorrow...