Just a story

• by christ1381
• 2010-12-15 12:12:25
• Surgery & Recovery
• 1457 views
• 0 comments

My electrophysiology study, the way I remember it

I’ve had a lot to say recently but for some reason I have lacked the means or desire to put my thoughts down on paper and/or keyboard. I am currently writing this doped up on oxycodone, which I would like to illustrate is completely for medical purpose and not recreational. Even though it is rather entertaining being doped up all day, but I digress. As everyone knows I have recently had a pacemaker put in to try and correct what has been described as a weird heart. This is not the terminology that I have come up with, but how it was described to me by my cardiologist.


All this was found out during an EP study (electrophysiology), which is where they take a catheter, which has electrodes attached to it, stab it into your femoral artery and guide it inside of your heart. While in your heart, they play with the electricity by doing something with electrical currents, then drugs to raise and lower the heart rate to see how it reacts. Moving along, the process began, starting off with a couple Novocain/Lidocaine shots right into the groin area to numb me up for penetration. They actually throw together some cocktail of sedatives to make you at ease, and I think partially erase you memory. A few minutes to let the area get numb and its game time. "You may feel a little pressure..!" that’s what they said.   

So after that little moment the rest of the procedure is pretty smooth sailing.  Like I stated early there are 3 stages; 1st the electricity which in its simplest form is making sure all the parts of your heart communicate with each other properly ensuring blood pumps for that whole living thing, 2nd a crack cocaine concoction to try and make you heart burst out of your chest to see how it reacts to stress, and 3rd something that slows you heart to a relative crawl. Now I have to say on the 1st stage of the test I apparently failed in all respects, I guess put simply my middle man was not relaying the message and taking all the money for himself. Realistically this was all the Dr. really needed to see to make a decision on how he wanted to proceed with my treatment, however just to be thorough he followed through with all three stages. Of course I passed the other two with flying colors according to my heart, unfortunately I was getting nauseous from the drugs. But the keen mind of my Dr. saw this as a bad thing I was administered two viles of Phenegrin, which I think is a tranquilizer to be honest because this stuff obliterates me. So this mixed with the sedatives really left me defenseless against sleep, or a coma. So honestly, I don’t really know how the procedure ended but I do know that the Dr. wanted to give me a pacemaker right there and then. In my less than conscious state, the only thing I was really sure of was that I wanted to sleep, and sleep long and hard. My Dr. was having none of this and was insistent on talking to my lifeless body demanding an educated decision on if I wanted to go straight into surgery. I think I declined his generous offer to operate on sheer annoyance at his frequent interruptions of my coma, people should be allowed to "coma" if they need to. I told him there was not a chance of me doing the surgery that day, I just wanted to eat and sleep, heart be damned. Actually I probably said nothing of the sort, I probably just whined and said no or muttered something resembling no.  I honestly do not have much more recollection of the situation than this, this is the first installment of a 3 parts series, I know it’s late, but it’s better than nothing.