Home Again, Home Agin

Well, the hospital is a hell of a place for the sick. My instructions were to come in at ten A.M. with an empty stomach. By eleven I saw my nurse who told me a wonderful rhyme for the first of May, which is, sadly for us, snowing and very cold. The rhyme is: "Hooray hooray, the first of May, outdoor sex begins today!" That did it for me. The fact that I had waited an hour, fasting and pissed off about it, vanished in an instant. I have terrible veins, tiny and rollers. But she hit one on the first try, but since I'm on blood thinners made one hell of a mess as she changed tubes. They hooked me up to the constant EKG thingy, pulse ox thingy on the finger and a blood-pressure cuff that kept a constant read going. Pulse was high--141 today, but oddly not as high as yesterday. You take your good news where you can get it. Pulse oxygen is normal. Well thank god for small favors. Then there I stayed wired up and beeping for two fucking hours, until the cardiologist could get to me. Once he came in I was told that if they found nothing bad with the little camera they were going to shove down my throat to get a closer look at my heart (looking for blood clots), then they would shock me with the paddles to try to reestablish normal rhythm. Good new, bad news. No clots. Three times shocked with the paddles and no normal rhythm. But I love that Versed. No memory of any of it and still, an hour later, a little buzz. So it's three more prescriptions, and the next round of tests to look forward to. It could be much worse. I could be drooling and brain dead.

Little Camera

Well, I'm up, bathed, and dying for a bowl of my morning latte. But not today. Today I go to have a little camera swallowed or shoved down an artery to look at the arterial chambers of my heart. I was a little discombobulated yesterday when they enumerated the procedures we would be embarking on to stop my fibrillating heart. So I not real clear on what, exactly they're doing exactly. Wish me luck.

More later, I hope.