Heart Rewiring - Let the Doc do it or Do-It-Yourself

I’m going in to get my heart overhauled on Tuesday. It’s pretty standard maintenance for an increasing number of baby boomer endurance athletes.  According to my logs, my odometer rolled over this year. I’m pretty sure I crossed the 100,000 mile mark for run, bike, swim if you throw in unlogged cross country skiing, kayaking, back country hiking and climbing miles.  Apparently the area around 4 or 5 pulmonary veins in my heart are trying to take over the pace making duties like an evil mother-in-law taking over the wedding planning at her son’s wedding. The fancy name for this is Paroxysmal Atrial  Fibulation.

Dad and I were talking over dinner the other night, and figured Mr. Fixit and I could do the job ourselves and help keep the cost of health care down. We figured all we needed was a pocket knife, a soldering iron and a bottle of Jack. I downloaded the schematic we need off the web. All we have to do is get me liquored up on the jack and have Dad cut down into my left atrium, find the bad wiring area that keeps making my heart race, and burn it out with the tip of the soldering iron. First we had to clear up an argument we had on what side was the left side. I think I convinced him it was my left not his. Just to be safe, I pulled out a felt marker and put a big X on the correct spot. Just when we had it all worked out, we realized we need someone to hold the flashlight. Joy balked at this, blowing all our plans. So much for being a supportive wife.

So now we have to drive all the way to Seattle so some fancy smanshy “electro-cardiologist” and a room full of strangers can knock me out, pull out all their fancy toys, and have their way with me. First they want to shave my “groin” to prepare the area. That right there made me nervous. What a way to introduce yourself to a room full of strangers. Once they’ve got that done I imagine they throw a blanket over me, pull out the Group Health Visa card, and spend the next hour or so shopping online with the windfall of money everyone gets to split after the house, Virginia Mason, takes their cut.

Then they get back to me shivering unconscious on the table. They crank up the music, hopefully not the oldies, and throw back the blanket and cut into both sides of my groin. Here’s where I hope they’re careful, whipping sharp objects around my nether regions poking things into the plumbing. Hopefully they’ll cover up the goods, between the cold and the fact that I’m in a chemically induced coma, the shrinkage will be embarrassingly severe. I wouldn’t be surprised if my little turtle pulls his head all the way back into his shell. Then they’ll thread a bunch of equipment up the big veins in my legs that are reportedly the diameter of your thumb. They’ll be snaking up all kinds of crap into those veins. A HD fiber optic camera, fancy flashlight, a couple of tools, I think one tools a cutter, joy buzzer nerve stimulator, and one has a balloon on the end of it..  When I first heard about the balloon, I was taken aback. What do they need a balloon for in there? Something to create a little party atmosphere? Perhaps it’s a contest to break the Guinness Book of World Records to see how many balloons you can inflate inside a patient’s heart. Apparently this isn’t a conventional balloon. It’s a cryogenic balloon used to freeze the bad mother-in-law tissue to death and send the bitch packing.  Unlike a party pack of balloons you get a target for $.79 for a hundred, I’d imagine this freezy balloon costs about 15 cagillion dollars. They’ll thread all the tools into the right side of the upper chamber of my heart and they punch through the tissue separating the left and right sides and continue threading the gear they need into the left side to do their business.

They’ll stuff some kind of temperature probe down my throat to make sure they didn’t take a wrong turn somewhere and are working in the wrong area and freeze or burn through the back side of my heart and into my esophagus. They will use the fancy joy buzzer they threaded into my heart to stimulate my diaphragm in little pulses to make sure they are not freezing or burning my breathy nerves. I’m assured that the risk of either of these things is very very low but if it happens it is very bad. I didn’t really want any details about what “bad” means. The whole time they’ll be using ultrasound to see where they are at. Complication happen in something like 1 in 1,000 patients. This is one time I hope I’m not that “special” one.

When they’re all done, they’ll pull the snakes out of left atrium, the hole they made will seal up in a couple of days, then it all exits the way it came in. A couple of high fives and everyone is out in time to make their tea times on the golf course. The whole party lasts between 2 and 5 hours. They’ll wheel me back to recovery and then into a private room where Joy can laugh at me and whatever gibberish comes out of my drug addled brain while I come out from the happy drugs they used to knock me out. One night in the hospital and home again the next day. A couple days of taking it easy and I’ll be able to ease back into my exercise addiction activities. Over the next 2 to 3 months we’ll see if the procedure worked. If not, they get to go back in and give it another shot. Stats show a 70% success rate on the first shot, and roughly 90% if they have to go in again.

I’m hoping the first time’s a charm. I hit a new age bracket this year. Maybe I’ll try to qualify for another Boston Marathon. I missed racing this year. After my heart acted up in the Tucson Marathon in 2010 I figured why pay the money for a race only to have a wacky heart act up and have to get another DNF (Did not Finish).