Modern Medicine or Mechanics

It's true that we are made of flesh and blood and thoughts and dreams and a host of all else imaginable. Yet, lately I have never felt more like a car. That's right! A mechanical contraption with varied parts of pumps and gears and belts, fluids here and there, and some spark plugs to crank the machine and keep it puttering along to where it needs to go. I lost a bit of the familiar humanness in the process of which I found myself in.

Healthcare is a field I am very familiar with, having spent around three decades of my life as a Registered Nurse. But nothing prepared me for the set of events I found myself thrown into. I became a patient.

The whole ordeal started out quite simply. A routine visit to the nurse practitioner for my yearly. The only real change I had encountered since our last meeting was increased fatigued, which was getting to be a severe malady and crimping my lifestyle. I was certain it was due to the many pleasantries of my old enemy, fibromyalgia. But I didn't discount that it could be a low Vitamin D deficiency since I was prone to that, also.

That all changed when she put her stethoscope to my chest and came up with, "Your heart is beating with irregularities." I quickly retorted with , "The hell you say," and put my fingers to my wrist to feel for myself. And so it was. It was true. (Isn't this just like noticing your engine has a sputter?)

So, off I went for diagnostics. (Just like we do when we take the car in...) First blood work. (Check the fluids.) Then and EKG to check the heart rhythm. It showed PVCs (pre-ventricular contractions) but there were lots of them. (The spark plugs weren't firing in order/the timing was off.) But the strangest thing is, I never felt the first "flutter" to know something was amiss. I was just going about my business but in slow motion.

Now, don't get me wrong, I've always admired the philosophies of Thoreau, but not in matters of my heart. Who exactly told it to re-arrange the music? Not me!

The next stop was a consult to a cardiologist. Okay, sounded reasonable. He made arrangements for an ECHO, a chemical Stress test (I wasn't about to have a manual exertion with fibromyalgia,) and a heart monitor to wear for three weeks. None of those diagnostics were difficult, but the waiting was.

The ECHO showed a small blockage in the front of my heart and that the pump (ejection fraction) wasn't terribly bad, but could be better. The other tests just verified that those PVCs were sustained and putting a burden on my heart. So, the next stop was to consult with an electrophysiologist for an ablation. In my case, the electrical pathways weren't going on their intended route, so he fixed that by destroying abnormal tissue and making the firing area normal again. (Like a car, I got re-wired, you could say.)

I'm back at home, feeling so much better now. My heart is beating normally again. I have one more test to do later this month and that is a CT of the coronary arteries to see if I will need a heart cath/stent. They only do that depending on the location/severity of any blockage. I am also taking two kinds of cardiac medications and expect one to decrease cholesterol. (Additives for the fluids.)

What can I say? When you have a Vintage car, you have to keep it up, right...I am a 1954 model, after all.