Fun* With Atrial Fibrillation

I debated about whether I would write a post solely devoted to atrial fibrillation since it might not be as fun to read if you have never experienced it and no one likes an inside joke that they aren’t part of. Do I say this from first hand experience? I don’t want to talk about it! Anyway, I shall attempt to get to the heart of atrial fibrillation. Oh come on, that’s funny. Perhaps not as funny as an America’s Funniest Home Videos crotch shot, but then what really is.

A couple of weeks ago, I slipped back into atrial fibrillation, again. That basically means that some part of my heart isn’t pumping right and that my heartbeats are all irregular. And no amount of bran is gonna fix this irregularity. My heart more or less quivers instead of pumping blood to wherever it should go, which is undoubtedly somewhere in my body. I’d like to be more ‘medical’ with my descriptions, but I tend to drift off when my cardiologist gets all med school graduate on me. Sadly, the same thing happens when people start mentioning numbers or stats to me. When you combine both, I think I just sort of start drooling and mentally picturing rainbows and leprechauns and dolphins that know my name. It’s really a nice place. They have cheese and ice cream and steak. Wait a minute, when did I walk into the grocery store…

Essentially, I have an irregular heart rhythm. I’ve had it about 10 times over the last 8 years, which really sucks because rhythm is the one word I cannot spell. I think it’s the placement of the ‘y’ that messes with me. I’ve tried to come up with alternatives to ‘rhythm,’ but haven’t succeeded. Sadly, my guilty feet (and every other part of me) just have no rhythm (Wham). Oh sweet patron saint of John Wayne movies, did I just quote Wham? Well that was most certainly a careless whisper on my part. Aw crud, I just did it again. The closest alternative word I came up with was ‘off beat,’ but it doesn’t sit with me well yet. Hopefully some day I’ll learn how to spell rhythm without the aid of a spell checker. I mean how hard can it be to spell when in my sleep I can spell supercalifrag…never mind.

One may ask how someone’s heart can develop an irregular rhythm. Actually go ahead and ask me that so I can answer it. I’ll wait, go ahead…

Well, that’s a great question. Thanks for asking. My cardiologist says that my atrial fibrillation is due to the stress and development of heart failure after having lived with my bad valve for so long because the heart was forced to work so hard (at least now I can take solace that part of me is a hard worker), though I think it has to do with me sticking my tongue on too many 9-volt batteries as a kid. Apparently, the heart is one big mass of electrical impulses. When the heart gets tweaked, the electrical impulses start firing at the wrong time, thus messing up the rhythm. I should also mention that having the heart cut into doesn’t do much to help it either. In fact, I can support this with my 3 receipts for emergency room visits within 2 weeks of coming home from open heart surgery.

In the past, I have gone to the emergency room, been put asleep and had my heart shocked back into regular rhythm. If you have never been smashed on the head with a hard object and then seen tweety birds and stars, let me tell you that it’s pretty much the same thing. There are a few negative side effects to this, such as having part of my nipple shaved off by a nurse who wasn’t paying attention to what she was doing and burning of the skin. I also bit off a chunk of my tongue once when I lurched in my sleep during the shock. The medical term for the procedure is ‘cardioversion,’ but I prefer to call it a very expensive jump start. Then they adjust my antiarrythmic medication in the hopes that the atrial fib won’t return. I’m pretty much out of medicine options right now. The strongest and last medication I haven’t yet tried will turn my face blue. As I am already short, I do not relish the prospect of being referred to as a Smurf for the rest of my life, so that option is off the table. I should probably mention that the same medication ruins the lungs over time. My cardiologist assures me that reason is much more important than the Smurf thing. I seriously have my doubts.

However, lest you think that having chronic atrial fibrillation is a downer, I am here to tell you nothing could be further from the truth, especially when you have an artificial heart valve that ticks loud enough for people to hear it or children to be able to make comparisons between you and the crocodile that ate Captain Hook’s wrist watch in Peter Pan. I’m not sure that I just wrote the longest sentence ever, but I was definitely hoping for top ten there. One of the fun things to do is sit in a car with coworkers or in the conference room during those quiet and awkward final moments while we wait for a staff meeting to start. If it’s quiet enough and the acoustics are right, you can watch people start looking around trying to figure out what the ticking sound is. I love it when they finally rule out everything else and realize it’s me. This is usually when I start singing Rod Stewart’s ‘Rhythm Of My Heart’ softly. I know what you are thinking and the answer is yes, that’s the ONLY Rod Stewart song I often go around singing. Seriously.

That’s not all the fun to be had though. At night, I enjoy laying in bed and listening to my irregular heart beats and ticks. If I’m patient enough, the heart rhythm becomes the same as some of the 70s’ greatest disco tunes. Except when I get really calm right before falling asleep and then I swear I hear the beat of ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ (Gordon Lightfoot) or Helen Reddy’s ‘I Am Woman’ and that just freaks me out to the point of not being able to sleep. I’m also pretty sure that Lucy and Ethel have learned the tempo of a proper waltz thanks to my atrial fibrillation.

So there you have it, with the proper frame of mind, anything can be fun. This includes having low enough blood pressure that every time you bend over you begin to pass out and get all white headed. Oh wait, I think I mean light headed. White headed would mean I need Jessica Simpson’s ProActive.

*In this case, the word ‘fun’ is being used as a subjective, somewhat sarcastic term, much in the same way that I use ‘Oprah’ or even ‘the.’