Matters Of The Heart

Last December, something odd started with my heartbeats.  I didn’t feel faint or weak or put out in anyway, except for the odd out-of-order thumping and follow-up fluttering.  I waited for a week or so, but when it didn’t go away, and when it seemed to be all I could pay attention to (heart thingies are like that), I called my doc.

Well, that wasn’t the thing to do…because the gate keeper/phone answer-er said ‘what do you need to see the doc for?’ and when I answered ‘well see it’s like this, the heart does this thing and then this sort of happens and then I sort of feel this way…’ she said to me, hmmm...just a minute and let me check with the doc, and I am thinking oh good I am going to get right in to see him, but then she comes back and says I should go to the emergency room.

That is not what I wanted to hear.  I just wanted to get in to see the doc.  I was pretty sure this wasn’t bit deal because mostly I don’t have big health deals, and also…really?  The ER…so inconvenient!  And so expensive…and omg…the insurance rigamarole.  Somebody just shoot me…

Except…oh…see there it was again.  Thump thump fluttery…and since it was coming up on Christmas, and the doc appt wasn’t going to happen for a week, the ER it was.

So I finished up work, and went home, and waited for The Guy to get home.  After he had a chance to catch his breath, I said, ‘so anyway, there’s been this thing going on…blah blah blah, and I called the doc…blah blah blah, and we are suppose to go the ER.’

Blank look…’and why did I wait until he got home from work???’  Well, it seemed the thing to do at the time.

No wait at the ER when one has ‘heart palpitations’.  Funny that they don't call it by thump thump fluttery. Which I think is a much more fun technical term. We have a modern facility in my little burg, that isn’t overly large, but with all the conveniences. But everyone who works there is so young.  Really young.  How did that happen?

So what it is that I have is nothing much.  PAC’s…not political action committees, but pre-mature atrial contractions that many people have all the time and as to why now for me all of the sudden, who knows.  I got to go home that night from the ER 5 days before Christmas with only a innocuous thump in my chest, and a couple of itchy places on my sides where the monitors were stuck to me, which is a whole lot better than being admitted over the holidays with something seriously wrong.  So all to the good really, follow-up visits, tests, and insurance hoop-jumping aside.

And since, those annoying PACs would drift away for a few, and just when I think things were getting back to normal, I got to live with them again for three or four days.  Keeps me humble and not taking anything for granted.  Also keeps me exercising because I think there might be a correlation, but who knows.  Certainly not anyone I paid money to talk to and stick thing-a-mabobs on my chest.

Lately, now three months later, there seems to me more time in between without them than with them, which is a gift, and I am grateful. Seems it was a passing mysterious episode, come out of the blue, for who knows why.

But there are questions in my mind about docs and insurance and hospitals and sensibilities of how we do things and why we do the things we do.  But all in retrospect...now that I know I am okay.

PS Lately I have seen that my posts in Google reader all amiss with words running together and crazy formatting.  If one reads my posts only in Google reader, let this serve as a disclaimer, that while I do misspell on occasion, and my punctuation is not perfect, my posts are better in person of late than they have been represented in Google reader.