21:14 3/9/2004 Legal dope in the brain This has been a very confusing day for me; way too much dope, for one thing. The first part of the day went pretty much like I expected, and I was on the table about 11:00. Things got fuzzy pretty quickly after that, but I do remember looking at my right coronary (what did I tell ya!) and seeing it end really prematurely. From what I can remember, Dr Meyer handed the case over to Dr Datillo, who is their specialist for hard cases, he's accomplished at getting catheters to go where he wants them. He was the one that did my last two balloonings, in fact. Even with his expertise, it was a no-go. And even worse, since I was really having no pain, that pretty much meant that the muscle was dead anyway. After coming to that realization, I think the he kinda gave up on it, which made perfect sense to me. I sure as hell didn't like it, but it made sense. After I got all done, I was transported up to the cardiac unit and put on bed rest for six hours. Six hours is one helluva long time to be laying flat on your back if you're conscious. Not to mention boring. I finally got a nurse to give me some pain meds for my back and made it through the last two hours. At 20:30 I rang for the nurse and waited about five minutes with no response, then I was outta bed stretching. One came in about fifteen minutes later, didn't seem too upset with me. And right now, I have no idea what the plans are for tomorrow. There's a good chance that I'll get a pacemaker/defibrillator put in. This will boost the output of my heart, making it a lot more efficient than the bigeminal/trigeminal pattern that I seem to be stuck in. And it seems that my ejection fraction is way lower than it has been on earlier exams, and the pacer will allow a much greater volume of blood to get pumped with each beat. And all of this is really nice, of course, but I'm pretty worried about that dead muscle in the apex. Dead muscle can do two things: scar and rot. In this case, scarring is good, scarring is strong. Rotten heart muscle blows out, much like a bald tire with separated plies. I haven't really had much clear-thinking time to digest all of this, but my best guess at this point is that this process has been going on over a period of maybe several months, "silent" occlusions building incrementally with only a few twinges that I ignored. Finally, of course, the crescendo last Wednesday, which I thought was the start of something, when in fact it was the end of something. Which is a real good reason why I haven't had any more pain: all of the damage has been done that can be done in that area. Dr Meyer is gonna talk with his partner Dr Katz, who specializes in pacemakers, tomorrow morning, then let me know what my options are. I'm not really sure where this fits in to the scenarios that I built yesterday, if it fits at all. I should have had a forth category, something like "something totally unexpected" and given that about 3 percent.
artificial fire in the heart
Modern medicine!