A Bumpy Ride

It’s been an eventful week or two here—we have had a bunch of vehicle issues topped off by me visiting the ER yesterday afternoon. I will discuss that here, briefly, because many of my family members and friends may want to know, but I have to preface this by saying that while I appreciate everyone’s concern for my health, it really does no good to treat me like a china doll that is about to break. Please do not insinuate that I am not taking care of myself or that I work too hard. I think I do a very good job of taking care of myself. I don’t smoke, I drink one glass of wine per day, I exercise—I spent all day Saturday working in the garden and yard—and we eat food I cook from scratch using a lot of ingredients we grow ourselves. It just so happens that I’ve got a colorful medical history with a lot of issues. I can’t do anything to change that. As I pointed out to the husband, I could have a perfectly spotless health history and die in a car wreck on the road. Life is full of risks. Believe me, I know that better than anyone. I am not taking unnecessary risks, but neither am I going to sit around and let life pass me by.

The official diagnosis was an episode of atrial flutter, where the electrical impulses to my heart got out of sync. I waited to see if it would resolve spontaneously (in some people it will), but when it did not, I decided that I should seek medical care. The husband was setting up a job, so I called my friend, Elaine, and asked if she would drive me to urgent care. The docs at urgent care did an EKG and suggested I go over to the ER. There, I got settled in a room and discussed the plan of attack with the ER doctor. He wanted to start with a dose of medication and see how my heart rhythm reacted. That gave him a much clearer picture of what was going on. After consultation with a cardiologist, he came back and said they wanted to do a cardioversion, which is basically shocking my heart with an electrical current, similar to what they do when someone is crashing. They sedated me for that part (although Elaine stayed in the room) and I felt absolutely nothing. When I came to again, my heart rhythm was back to normal. According to Elaine, I told them all about my chickens while I was still loopy and coming out of the sedation, LOL. After another hour or so of observation, they gave me my discharge paperwork and sent me home. I have to make an appointment with a cardiologist for later this week.

This is not a benign condition, but it is treatable. The question is why it is happening. This could be a late side effect of one of the chemo drugs I got for the leukemia 27 years ago. Idarubicin is known to be cardiotoxic. Of course, given that the Cleveland Clinic doesn’t seem to care about long-term followup of cancer survivors—an oversight that annoys me to no end—information about long-term effects of treatment is almost nonexistent. This could also be linked to my known MTHFR mutation (I had to explain that one to the ER doc as it’s not a widely-known problem). I’ll lay all of this out for the cardiologist and see what he thinks. As with many of my medical issues, there may never be a clear-cut answer.

Props to the medical staff at both urgent care and the ER. Given my medical history, walking into a hospital causes me no small amount of anxiety. I appreciated the fact that despite this being a cardiac event, they did not immediately escalate the situation to Defcon 3. In addition, my having experience as a medical transcriptionist and a solid grasp of my medical history allowed all of us to skip the preliminaries. It’s far easier for everyone when they don’t have to translate everything into layman’s terms. And I also appreciated having Elaine’s calm presence with me. She brought her knitting and worked on a sweater.

Let’s move on to some sewing, shall we?

Just before I left for Alaska, the cutting table I ordered from Tracey’s Tables was delivered via freight. I told the husband not to worry about it until I got back. We finally had time to uncrate it over the weekend. I had thought I would put it upstairs in DD#2’s room, where my original cutting table has been living, but this is a substantial table made of solid oak. It weighs several hundred pounds. We might be able to get it up there if we can find another strong guy to help the husband move it, but I am inclined to leave it down here. I have it parked in my office at the moment.

I can pull it out, flip up the sides, and do my cutting here. When DD#2 was home, we talked about moving the bed out of her room to give me more space for my sewing supplies. I need to think about that some more. We do get guests every so often and I like to have a place for them to sleep, but I could rearrange things to make my workflow more efficient.

Also before I left for Alaska, I had a marathon cutting session with my Accuquilt cutter and made lots and lots of little paper hexies and fabric hexies. These were a terrific portable sewing project to work on at DD#1’s house in Ketchikan. I sat next to the window and watched the seals playing in the cove while making a pile of these:

I even sewed some together to make a little hexie flower:

No, I have no idea what I’m going to do with them. I likely will make this my summer project for working on at church, as wrangling a prayer shawl around is getting to be a bit much.

I still have a few tomato plants and the corn to put in the garden, and then weeding season will commence. The husband worked on the potatoes, which are looking stellar. I’m still trying to get in touch with the pig lady to see if she has stock for us. If she doesn’t, we’ll take a year off.