Five years ago, Pennie saw that I was having a hard time staying warm, so she insisted on some medical tests.
During my treadmill test, they realized that my maximum heart rate was slower than a normal person’s heart rate when they are asleep.
When Dr. Abrams read my EKG, he was shocked. “Complete Heart Block” means that the nerve that is supposed to tell your heart to beat isn’t actually connected to your heart. So there is no literally signal telling your heart to beat!
As it turns out, I was most likely born with this condition.
Fortunately, I had an “escape rhythm,” which means that just enough electricity was leaking out the broken end of the nerve that it would occasionally reach the exterior of my heart, causing it to give a little half-hearted beat.
All the doctors were fascinated that I was able to behave like a normal person.
They installed a pacemaker, and all was well.
Then about 7 months ago, I started feeling cold again. The tests showed that the second chamber of my heart wasn’t pumping as hard as it should.
That’s when things got messy. The old pacemaker had to be taken out and replaced with one that has an extra wire to go to the other side of my heart. There was a significant chance that they were going to have to remove the old wires, which would leave a couple of holes in my heart.
And those same wires had also attached themselves the walls of my arteries. This means that removing them could rip a hole in an artery. Big problem. And then you’ve also got to deal with the bleeding from the holes where the wires had been pulled out. Keep in mind that all of this was being done through a tiny probe sent down my arteries from a place up near my left collarbone.
Bleeding to death on the operating table was a real possibility.
When they woke me up (HOORAY!) they told me that they had been able to use the two original wires that had installed for the first pacemaker, so the only tricky part was connecting the new, third wire to the other side of my heart without triggering a blood clot that would cause me to die from a stroke.
