Gone Sicky

I haven't felt well for a long time. Roughly a month ago I got one possible answer--I am in atrial fibrillation. My resting heart rate is marathon runner's range after a marathon. And my blood pressure starts high in the morning, which makes me feel oddly energetic, and then crashes sometime in the mid afternoon, leaving me fainting and weak. I have what in my grandmother's day was called malignant hypertension. Now they just call it high blood-pressure. Mine was diagnosed in my late teens, about the same time I started experiencing the symptoms of PTSD, anxiety disorder, and severe depression, and then eventually bipolar disorder.

I have been on a huge number of blood-pressure medications over my lifetime. The hypertension is a family trait on my mother's side of the family. But on both sides of my family, it is the heart that finally kills you. It is a family of broken hearts. The men all die suddenly of massive coronary events, going along, feeling fine, and then blam, dead instantly, and in some cases young--my oldest half-brother had his big event in his mid forties. The women in my mother's family have not faired as well--they all have small strokes that eventually leave them with what is called vascular dementia. It is very like Alzheimer's disease. And ends the same way.

My fibrillation which was pretty much asymptomatic, got picked up when I visited my doctor about some routine blood-work that was not great news. Because I have this family history, and am on blood pressure medications, my doctor always checks, and this last time my blood-pressure was so hinky, they did an EKG, which showed the arterial fibrillation.

So with the referral to a cardiologist, I got the full treatment--echo cardiogram (fibrillating like crazy), visit to the cardiologist and another EKG, still fibrillating, a whole array of new medications, a procedure to check for blood clots in the heart (No blood clots) then the paddling several times to try to shock my heart back into normal rhythm. No luck with that, only burns and bruises on my chest and back, and another batch of drugs to get me ready for an angioplasty. So I have a small window of feeling well each day. I start the day feeling well enough to write, brain seems to be in order, but by mid-afternoon I start to crash. My brain stops working so well, I begin to feel like I might faint, so I work my way across the room to my bed and after taking my afternoon hand-full of meds., I gradually begin to come back to physical functioning, but my brain doesn't work as well. So learning things is more difficult. I have been trying to learn to link, so I can become a full-fledged, functioning member of the smart, savvy blogging community.

I only started blogging in January, and did not have great computer skills to begin with. I have a wonderful Administrator who has been kind enough to teach me what I've been able to learn, and who has tricked out my blog, so my creative writing sites are linked and the chapters of my book, Maggy, are linked and the book can be read chapter after horrifying chapter. But he's been trying to teach me to do these things for myself, to make me less dependent, more skilled. I worry that he will give up on me, since I learn so slowly the simple things he has so patiently been trying to teach me. Nothing new seems to stick in my brain. I want to make him a lovely care package to thank him for the time, the patience, the friendship and generosity, but I don't feel well enough to venture out and get the tin for the two kinds of homemade cookies he craves. It will all work out, one way or another. But for the time being I will remain merely a writer with no tricks up my sleeve, and settle for editing the final chapters of the book in preparation for learning how to post and link them.

And if I get boring in this period of brainlessness, I can only hope you will seek entertainment by reading the book, leaving me breadcrumbs to let me know you've stopped by.