The End?

9:00am and I am driving to the doctors. I'm not looking forward to this visit much but realize I need to find out what's wrong with me. I'm going to be facing a barrage of "When did you first notice this?", "Why didn't you come in before?"

The answers are pretty simple- I noticed my heart was randomly going off beat about a year ago, but it always went back to normal. During that year I underwent a lot of stress, sleep derpivation and caffiene excess. It was deliberate, I did so because I wanted the job I had been given to be a success for me and the rest of my team. I believed in what I was doing. C'est La Vie! I don't have the job now anyway. With all the stress and the caffiene I figured that was why my heart was going out of whack.


After a couple of pointed questions from the doctor she decides to take my pulse- one handed, then two handed. "Hmmm... pretty eratic pulse." she comments. Then she puts on her stethoscope and listens to my heart.... "And we will have the ECG machine in here NOW!" she barks at her nurse.

Next thing I know I am wired up lying flat on a table and the ECG machine does its thing very quickly. I can't make head nor tail of what the trace means but I do note that some of the lines are off the graph paper which can't be good can it?

"Not good?" I enquire sheepishly.

"Don't worry." replies the doctor and hurries out. When she returns she has a photocopy of the ECG trace. "Take this, and go immediately to A&E (accident and emergency) at Good Sam, they will be expectiing you."

Since it is on the way I drop off my car and have Dena drive me there withFiona in tow. This day is turning sour rapdily and I'm not sure what to expect next.

The Triage Nurse at A&E does indeed know to expect me and says "Oh, yes your are 'A flutter boy', take a seat." So I do, and watch and wait as a plethora of patients are called through by the nurse into A&E.

"Well you can't be too bad, since the triage nurse is sending all these other people in before you." Dena points out.

When the room is empty (and our stomachs too) Dena asks the triage nurse if I will be admitted soon and if she can bring some food in with us.

"Who are you?" enquires the triage nurse. "Did you fill out a form? If you didn't you don't exist to me."
Nice to find this out after an hour. So I fill out the form and am allowed into the triage nurses inner sanctum. She checks my vital signs and then things start to go into overdrive. She calls urgently for a cubicle and when she is told number 4 is available she won't let me walk to it. My heart is going so fast she insists on putting me in a wheelchair and wheeling me to it in case I top 200bpm.

As soon as I am in the cube an onterage of nurses file in and wire me up to monitors, drips, ECG machines and blood pressure testers. The stress of all this does indeed take my heart past the 200bpm barrier. Then a doctor arrives and they all look at the monitor. My heart is going so fast they can't see what bit of the heart is doing what. So the doctor decides to do a "chemical reboot of my heart" as they called it. The ideas here is that if they reboot the heart there will be a short period of time while it spins back up to its insane speed and in that time they can see on the monitor what bits are doing what before it all becomes a blur.

The first time they try this nothing happens so they decide to double the dose. At this point I realize that something could go horribly wrong and try to get Dena to come over in case it does. I'll never forget that moment as long as I live- she doesn't come and suddenly my body weight slams into the bed, I get very hot and gasp for breath. And then it's over. 6 seconds of absolute terror for me and a perfectly normal procedure for the A&E team. Result: It's a Atrial Fibrillation which is the lesser of all the random heart beat problems. This was what I thought I had from talking with Ali and Richard the week before- I just didn't realize I had it at 200bpm!

Now they can treat it and give me a drip of Dialtizem which gradually slows down my heart over the next few hours. The beat is still totally random.

By 4:00pm the A&E team as satisfied they have stabalized my condition and find me a bed in the cardiac ward. Around 6:00pm my (newly assigned) cardiologist Dr. Siegel comes round for a chat. He explains Atrial Fibrillation and what can cause it. There is good news and bad news. The bad news is that Atrial Fibrillation can cause clots to build up in my heart and if they "convert" my heart to a normal rythmn those clots could give me a stroke. Also the cause of the Atrial Fibrillation at this point in unknown and could be an electrical or physical fault with my heart. Either way my chance of stroke starts out in the less that 1% per year range. But this compounds like interest at a bank and by 10 years I wouldn't bet on being alive if I have this problem. I'm left to digest this and my hospital meal for an hour or so. Then around 8:00pm Dr. Siegel pops his head round my curatain to tell me "It's your Thyroid. They just posted the results" which is good news as it means something else is causing my heart to go out of whack not my heart on it's own.


Life on a ward is quite different to life in the A&E. For a start time moves much slower and there are far fewer staff per patient. The nurse looking after me (Cathleen) asks me lots of questions and types the results into a computer. She is efficient and friendly following her procedures but that seems to be where it ends.

Towards the end of her shift my drip feeding me the drug to slow my heart down runs out. I ring for help. 15 minutes passes and then Nurse Cathleen appears.
"Oh dear, I don’t have that. I need to go to the pharmacy to get it." she declares and disappears for another 30 minutes. This is not good and I am starting to get anxious.

When she returns she brings her shift change nurse with her. She fiddles with the IV tubing to my wrist and declares that she can’t change the drip because the A&E people use different tube connections. She then gets some "surgical" pliers and wrenches one of the couplings loose. My blood spills everywhere. I point out the tap between me and the rest of the IV couplings and show her how to turn it off. At 60 minutes and counting the nurses finally couples me up to the new drip. The machine that measures the drug feed then bleeps madly for another 15 minutes due to large pockets of air that have gotten between me and my drugs. I’m not impressed.

The night shift nurse asks if I have "ambulated" and I tell her no. She asks me to walk if I can so I do, but with 60+ minutes off my drip my heart goes mad, alarm bells ring and I am put to bed with a bottle to pee in.