Category Archives: Medical

I’m Getting a WATCHMAN

Medical, Science

I’m getting a WATCHMAN™  tomorrow morning, and I’ve been in a sort of denial about it. I have AFib – AFib is Atrial fibrillation, a heart condition that causes an irregular and rapid heartbeat in the upper chambers of the heart – according to Google AI – and although I’ve been through half a dozen procedures to get rid of it, the AFib keeps coming back.

However, the biggest danger of AFib is a stroke brought on by a blood clot generated in the heart, swirling up into the brain and causing a stroke. The fix for that is to have me take blood thinners – not just me, obviously, anybody with AFib – so that the blood doesn’t clot.

It turns out, however, that 90% of the blood clots come from an area lovingly called the LAA (Left Atrial Appendage). Big Medical, if there is such a thing, has invented a way to cover or plug the LAA as the sort of fascinating video below shows (if you can get through the pitch in the middle).

The entire procedure should take about 25 minutes, my doctor tells me, and I’ll spend 3 hours recovering. Prep starts at 5:15 AM, and I should be back home by noon.

A thought at 5 AM

Medical, Politics,

After waking up at 5 AM with a throbbing pain in my knee, I started thinking about the Iranian woman who was going to be stoned to death for adultery. It seems the case has now been referred to the Iranian equivalent of the Supreme Court to see if the sentence can be changed to….wait for it now, reduced to, commuted to….hanging.

I am not sure if the court’s thinking – and I am using the term thinking loosely here – is supposed to be based on legal grounds or a religious interpretation of  God’s unboundless Love; either way it seems to me, sitting here in the dark, the decision will really be made by some old man pulling an old, predigested, opinion out of his ass.

And that got me thinking about how arbitrary those in power, even the elected ones, rule. Rick Perry – what an asswipe – can let a man be executed without looking at the new evidence that might show him to be innocent. Like George Bush – or Dick Cheney, if you prefer to see Bush the Younger as weak – going to war against Iraq. Or Bashar al-Assad hanging on to power in Syria.

I want to be outraged, and I am somewhat, but it is really like being outraged that some people have more power, more prestige, more talent. No outrage changes the fact that some people are ruling other people or that the rulers, in the end, are doing what the rulers want.

Boxing Day at Sequoia

Medical

I have been on a pretty heavy duty regime of antibiotics since Friday and it is now starting to pay off. For the first time in about three weeks, I don’t feel punk.

It turns out that I – or my blood atleast – have been the host to a growing colony of Enterococcus – that is its family name, I don’t know the Christian name – that is now being beaten back by heavy doses of Vancomycin HCL and Gentamicin Sulfate given through my new PICC line. How long the colony has been there is up to question as is how it got there

Being in the hospital over Christmas has been fine which is not the say that being infected is fine; that part has been a real pain in the ass. At first, the combination of the novelty, being scared, and feeling punk resulted in my having what I could pass off for having a pretty good time but now the novelty has worn off, I feel very safe, and I feel much better.

Part of why I feel safe, is that when I say My knee hurts, a doctor show up and says Let’s run a ultrasound to make sure you don’t have a blood clot, then, when that  ultrasound shows I don’t have a blood clot, the doctor says Let’s take a blood test to see if your who-haw level is high. In the meanwhile, they don’t want me to walk until they know what the problem is.

Of course this also why I also am getting bored. Everytime I involuntary roll my eyes, a battery of doctors show up to remind me that I have a aorta valve made out of cow parts and We want to be careful.

In the meanwhile, life in the hospital is different. The temperature doesn’t change, the light level in the halls doesn’t change, the sound level – pretty high, with bells, buzzers, and calls for Code Red to Room 274 –  doesn’t change; and the level of good humor and general joy of life is extraordinarily high. I think this is because everybody is in service and it really is better to give than to receive.


 

Christmas at Sequoia Hospital

Medical

A funny thing happened on the way to Christmas, I ended up in the hospital. It turns out that I have a major blood infection and my fever went up to 103 on Thursday night. They took some blood samples, cooled me down with Tylenol and intravenous fluids and let me go home.  At 7 the next morning, they called to say that my blood was growing a culture and I should come back in, “The sooner the better.”

So here I am, getting antibiotics three or four times a day, intravenously. Much better than any alternative I can think of.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!