Back to the hospital…

They should offer a frequent flyer program at St. Francis Hospital.  Last week I did 7 days in the heart hospital for a relapse of dizzy spells and shortness of breath much like I did earlier this year.

Now I’m told I need a pacemaker/defibrillator which will be placed next month.  So while this isn’t “open heart surgery” per se, it’s close enough to the ticker that it has me sufficiently spooked.

This experience is paralleling what happened to my dad in the last six years of his life, starting in November 1994 with his first heart attack.  He endured three altogether, surviving two of them.  To my knowledge he did not have any procedures in hospital to treat the heart attacks other than treatment medically so what I’ll be going through is uncharted territory.

Circling back to heart attacks, apparently I’ve had one.  My cardiology team has been reluctant to call it that for reasons unknown, but as of last week the cardiologist who spoke to me said that I did, in fact, suffer a heart attack as my condition at diagnosis over a year ago…two of three major vessels blocked…met the criteria. 

Funny enough, I take no comfort in knowing that I’m a heart attack survivor.

You’ve read about my mental state in the past few entries.  This piles onto a rather large heap of shit I’ve been dealing with since 2021 completely on my own.  In order, the heart attack and it’s aftermath, toe amputation surgery and six months of recovery and the departure of my only child to another state, and now two cardiac episodes within four months and upcoming surgery.

It’s a lot to deal with by yourself.  

It has me spooked, but not frightened to the point that I’m thinking about not having it. I made that decision when I was in the hospital and I intend to honor it, but it doesn’t mean that I’m not thinking about it all the time.

It makes me really really think about where my life’s trajectories had to beyond all this.  There’s very little risk in the procedure itself as it is fairly common, but this will be the first time that something other than an appendage is being operated on, and that’s the sort of thing that gets up inside of my head.

There will be more entries on this, as I organize my thoughts.