A few months ago I had this heart condition called tachycardia — instead of a normal boom – boom – boom it was more like a pip·pip·pip·pip pattern. This scared me, because the faster a heart beats, the weaker each beat becomes until the stroke volume is nonexistent. Death then follows in a few minutes.
So I took myself down to the local hospital to get the old ticker checked out. Not an easy task, because the problem kept coming and going.
I went to the hospital during an episode, but the the time I got there, it was over. But it reoccured while I was in the exam room, and I was grateful for that, because now I could show them I wasn’t just imagining it. (My heart rate shot up to 135 beats per minute. Anything over 100 is considered dangerous.)
Now the human body is a fascinating thing. In the absence of any modern medical treatment, it will try to fix the problem on its own. It knows when the power of each stroke is diminished, so it tries to compensate the only way it can — with more strokes per minute to keep that ol’ type O flowing. But this sort of compensation tends to mask the real problem — not a fast heart rate, but a reduced flow per beat. There are medications to slow the heart down, but they could have killed me rather than saved me. But adenosine is a safe drug to use in this situation.
So they gave me a shot of adenosine to restore a normal heart rhythm, and told me to come back if it happens again.
It happened again, late at night. So I got dressed the next morning and returned to the hospital, even though the attack was over. So far, I did exactly what they told me to, right? But when they examined me again, they clarified: I have to arrive while my heart is still skipping that crazy beat, not after the fact. So I went home again.
Now what causes this flavor of tachycardia? Inside each heart is an electrical system that counts cadence for the atriums and ventricles. The result is a dance of a steady heart rhythm. But sometimes a secondary electrical system develops, competing with the first. The result is like two people dancing, and they are both trying to lead. As the problem worsens, the heart goes into a frantic effort while accomplishing basically nothing — like two people dancing and no one is leading. Hello, Grim Reaper.
So what do we do about that? The permanent cure is to shove an electrical probe up through the inferior vena cava into the heart itself, and zap the offending secondary circuit out of existence.
But first I had to get there. One evening, it was particularly bad, and I had to call the services d’urgence. They loaded me onto the meat wagon, and off we sped, emergency horns blaring.
By the time I got to see a doctor, my heart rate went way up to an incredible 220! The doctor turned the screen away from me, trying to hide the bad news, but it didn’t matter — I passed out.
This is the point where I would have died had I not gone to the hospital. I would have simply collapsed on the floor, and never got up again.
I woke up a few minutes later, after they gave me another dose of adenosine as a stopgap measure. Two days later I was in surgery getting the permanent cure described above, and I never had this particular problem since then.
Too much drama in my life!
