Addendum, November 19-22 and Beyond: Getting My Heart Back to Normal

I don’t want to bore my readers with a lot of medical mumbo-jumbo so I’ll keep this simple, and you’ll understand why my heart problems doomed my South American trip from the start.

One of the first items of business after returning home was manually downloading the data from my tiny, implanted heart monitor to a phone-like device on my nightstand which then transmits the data to my cardiologist’s office.  The monitor records the rate and nature of my heart beats, and an electro-cardiologist can study the readout to determine what’s happening electrically in my aging “blood pump”.  Normally, the downloads and transmissions automatically happen once a day, but I wanted to be sure my doctor had all the latest data from my trip when I called his office which I did first thing on Monday morning.

I have a tiny recorder implanted under the skin next to my heart which records my heartbeats.  I’ve had two of them – their batteries die after 3-5 years and the one in my hand was the first one – the cardiologist gave it to me as a souvenir after removing it.  On the left is the bedside receiver-transmitter which collects and sends the data to my electro-cardiologist’s office.  Photo by Judy Greenfield.

 

I got a return call later that day from the cardiology office asking if I could come in the following morning for a procedure called a “cardioversion”.  This would involve small electrical shocks to get my heart back into a normal rhythm.  The heart monitor readouts showed that my heartbeats had been out of sync and too fast ever since that birthday party the night before I left for Chile.  No wonder I had such a tough time on my trip.  Deep down, I’d known all along that something wasn’t quite right but it took the camera theft to finally shake me into reality.  Much as I had wished pain and suffering on the person who had so stealthily stolen my camera, they had actually done me a favor by pushing me to go home.  Travel insurance would cover the camera but the heart situation could have really gotten out of hand, perhaps leading to a stroke when I was muchos kilómetros from a hospital with specialists who knew my history.

When I was all decked out on a gurney with IVs on Tuesday morning awaiting the cardioversion, my electro-cardiologist of five years and medical hero, Dr. Charles Fuenzalida, stopped by for a quick chat.  It seems that some poor bugger scheduled for an ablation that morning (the procedure I’d had 15 months earlier) had done a major fuck-up.  He forgot that he wasn’t supposed to eat or drink anything for 10 hours before the procedure and had confessed to having a snack around 4:00 AM.  So, now the anesthesiologist wouldn’t touch him, and they had a slot open.  My doc told me he could do the cardioversion (a procedure taking only a few minutes) to get back my normal rate and rhythm but he couldn’t promise that the problem wouldn’t come back again sooner rather than later.  He recommended that I have another ablation.  They were already to go because the time slot for the lengthy procedure had just opened up.  It was up to me.  I thought for a moment and replied, “Let’s do it!”

A few hours later I woke up with a normal heartbeat.  They kept me in the hospital overnight for observation and released me the next morning with instructions to do no heavy lifting or vigorous exercise for a few days.  They didn’t want me to pop open my incision which, by the way, was scarcely bothering me at all.  

Leaving the hospital the day after my procedure.  I was still a bit out of it from the anesthesia but hey, my heart was back to normal and life was good!  Photo by Judy Greenfield.

 

I took it easy for a few days before getting back to 2-mile-walks, vigorous stationary bike rides, and push-ups.  Except for the residuals of a bad cold I had picked up in Chile, I’m now feeling just fine.   

 

So where does the Wandering Geographer go from here?  When I’ve had bad experiences in life, I’ve tried to learn from them and go on from there. After my traumatic couple of days in Chile and a wretched two days returning home, I swore I’d never travel by plane again unless I absolutely had to and would limit myself in the future to forays by car or train in the U.S. and Canada. Now I’m thinking, “Never say never”.  I really enjoy writing and putting together these posts with the photos.  Frankly, all the positive feedback I receive from readers of this blog and the large numbers of people who are looking at my posts make me think I’m on to something that people find interesting, informative, or may just entertaining.  I don’t know exactly who all is reading my stuff but I get a tally of the number of people who have viewed my posts and I’m pleasantly surprised by the totals.

 

I’ll keep pondering all this while doing some hiking in Arizona this winter and will let you know if I come up with any answers.  Many thanks for your support!!!