Saturday, March 27, 2010

No more delta wave.

Just a quick note... I realized I never posted anything about my little operation that I had done back on the 16th (March).

Everything went fairly well... after they found a vein that is. They had to call in some ICU specialty nurse to get an IV in. Sigh. What do you expect when I've been fasting with no water?

They got me down there, proceeded to jam catheters into my neck and both large veins in my groin. Seriously. I swear the petite Chinese doctor hopped up on me to get more leverage for my neck. I nearly cried from an intense pain in my shoulder the entire time. Oh, did I mention I was awake?

My sweet personal nurse was kind enough to drape warm blankets around my freezing cold digits that were once known as hands.

Then the fun started. They got the catheters into my heart and then came the adrenaline. Next thing you know, my heart was doing swan dives and belly flops.

They did get it to go into that special rhythm, meaning 180-220 bpm, the short circuit that was the symptom I was supposed to have from this whole White-Parkinson-Woulf syndrome... but never did.

Meanwhile, I'm starting to tear up seeing as though I forgot how to breathe, I was freezing, and my shoulder was dead.

So my sweet nurse says, it's okay, they know what they're doing, and they can get it back to normal in no time.


Sure. After about 10 minutes (or was it 10 seconds?) of that, they reeled me back in from the deep end.... and ah, gave me more "happy juice," which I believe was their medical term for it.

And I slept like a baby. Meanwhile they were able to find where that extra current was passing through, and burned a tiny little spot in my heart to stop that. They fed me more adrenaline with no averse affects (good to know for the future), yanked the catheters and sent me on my way.


Next subject: peeing in bedpans while laying in a hospital bed.

Just kidding.

I couldn't get up for 24 hours. Muy disgusting. Ew.

However, I slept like a baby in the hospital... 10:30-6:00 and 6:30-8:00. Best sleep I'd had in months... maybe that was due to the morphine.

Oh yes, morphine, because of chest pain. Which I was still having after the surgery; no big deal, they said.

And still 3-4 days later. No big deal. Also a scary incident involving bpm of about 140, a hour of pto from work, and rushing to get an emergency ekg done. Nothing wrong, still no delta wave, therefore no problemo.

I'm feeling really well, back to what I was before the surgery and my neck insertion point just looks like any ol' zit. The groin insertion points are completely fine... there was some pain there too afterwards for a few days, but not serious enough I guess.

That's about it...

Oh, and Joel, Mary Jo, and Adam are on my nice list.. they visited me in my single bed, 5-star hotel room. And my work sent me flowers. They still smell good. :)

And the biggest relief: my delta wave is gone. My heart can rest between beats now.



Yay.

5 comments:

Lindsay said...

yeesh- not fun! glad you're feeling back to normal... wish i could have gotten up to see you! :)

Mariah said...

Aw, you're sweet. :)

Elissa & Logan said...

phew! a good thing to be done with huh?

Snigglefrits said...

You know how to entertain yourself!

I've had the cath in the groin & it hurt as bad as many other pains I've had in the past.

Like you, they never found anything wrong with me either, so I reckon that means we're made of Special Stuff.

I'm glad you're apparently a-okay. Take care of yourself & know I'm thinking about you. Wish I'd of been there- I wouldn't have let you get cold to start with. (I'm just going to be that good a nurse, dangit all!)

Have a very Happy Easter, Mariah!

ShareandRemember said...

That sounded positively terrible! Glad you're better now! Also, I changed my blog address to: http://shareandremember.blogspot.com/

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