I remembered what I was leading up to the other day with my short hair post. This is a huge accomplishment. I was standing in the kitchen taking a drink from my water bottle when I suddenly remembered…and then I missed my mouth with the water bottle and spilled water down my shirt. It’s a good thing it was water and not something colored red that would stain. Or it wasn’t a food item that would stain, like a blackberry. Tony can’t understand how I miss my big mouth, but it happens. That reminds me, the other day I was mowing the yard with Mom’s riding mower and I accidentally ran into Dad’s pokeberry weed/bush/tree. I managed to get pokeberries squished all over my shirt and arms. When I finished mowing the yard I looked down and my arms looked like I had fought with a bobcat and lost. I was afraid that Mom or Dad would see me out their window and think I had managed to run myself over with the lawnmower so I took a break to clean up. It took two days for the color to come off my arms, and my shirt is stained. Dang it. What I was leading up to the other day was my devilish thoughts and behavior. (The horns, remember?) I have learned some filtering skills for my thoughts and spoken words. I just don’t use those skills on a regular basis…especially when I am frustrated or impatient, which is most often when I am dealing with medical stuff. So, to deal with my impatience I like to mess with the medical staff…it keeps them on their toes. Most of the time I do silly stuff to make them laugh, because their jobs are stressful, but other times…. Take for instance the dreaded mammogram…I don’t need to go into detail about how uncomfortable they can be. The technicians doing the mammograms do many of them, and most are normal routine screens. All it takes is one abnormal one and that technician’s day is ruined – they probably go home thinking about that one poor person who just started a long journey in fighting breast cancer. It has to be heart-breaking. So when I go in for mine I say off the wall things to lighten their day. When they are setting up the machine I tell them, “Oh, you need to drop that thing about six inches, because when I take off this underwire bra they’ll be down by my belly button.” Or sometimes I’ll say, “Can you squish the one on my right a little bit harder? It’s a full cup bigger than the left one and I’d like them to match.” My electrophysiologist (that’s a big word for heart doctor who specializes in arrhythmias) is very serious. I’ve made it my goal to get him to lighten up and enjoy life a little more. Most of them are pretty serious, but especially my current one. I tell him he can only do what he can do, and if it works that’s great; if it doesn’t work then oh well, as long as he tried his best. So he gets to be a continuous target of my pranks. After he placed my last ICD in me he was very worried about infection because of all the scar tissue he had to clean up from previous surgeries. If it gets infected then they have to remove EVERYTHING because bacteria may harbor on the device and the leads. Removing a lead is dangerous and not many surgeons do it. The lead is a wire fed into the heart with a tiny corkscrew on the end that they screw into the heart muscle to hold it in place. It has a sheath on it that scar tissue forms on in the vein to hold that in place…so when one breaks they just disconnect it from the device and put in a new lead, and they bury the disconnected end in a muscle somewhere. Right now I have two operational ones, and one buried one. So, after my last surgery he had me on antibiotics for a while. I overdid it by going back to work to soon, and the ICD pocket got a bleed that made the area swell up like a balloon with blood. Back to his office I went and he was upset. We had to use compression bandages to get my body to absorb the blood, but I said, “Let’s just take an insulin needle and suck it all out!” Ha! He panicked and went into a fifteen minute speech about infection and risks and scenarios. I said, “I’m kidding!!!” See, he needs to lighten up and not be so serious. My ICD is set to fire at somewhere around 180 beats per minute. The pacemaker is on all the time at 60 because my normal heart rhythm is in the low 40’s or high 30’s. 60 feels a lot better. I’ve never been conscious when the ICD fired…that’s a good thing because I’ve been told it feels like a mule has kicked you in the chest. So if I do anything that raises my heart rate I need to be careful not to go above that threshold. I know this and I make sure I don’t get it that high – like when I am walking on the treadmill I keep the incline and speed just low enough to be under that. But to antagonize the doctor I told him I want to start training for marathons. His expressions are priceless, and they amuse me. I’ll get him to relax one of these days. Another fun one is chest x-rays. Most technicians are good and ask questions, but every once in a while I will get one who acts like my needing an x-ray is such a burden on their day. They don’t read past the order line that says what films they need to take. I don’t mention my ICD to them…I let them be surprised when it shows up on the pictures. They’ll come out of their little booth and sheepishly ask, “You have a defibrillator?” I say, “No. That’s my Giga Pet. Remember those?” Or my favorite, “No, but I was abducted by aliens out at the Grand Canyon last year. Did they put something in me?” I tell myself I am teaching them a gentle lesson to be a bit more observant, but really I’m just having fun messing with them. (Remember the horns!) Friday I had a nuclear scan of my parathyroid glands. The technician was new and in training. He was very nice, young, and very handsome. He was trying his hardest to remember the spiel he had to go through about the radioisotope, the safety of it, what to expect, etc. I couldn’t pass this one up, so I kept getting him flustered and he’d try to remember what he had said and still needed to say. I already knew it all, but I didn’t tell him that. At the end he asked, “Any questions?” I said, “Yeah, will my urine glow in the dark, because I want my grandson to see it if it does.” His jaw dropped and it took him a few seconds to realize I was not serious. I think I need to start taking pictures of faces when I do these things. They would keep me giggling for hours. That’s it for today…waiting to hear what’s next in this adventure.
Posted on: Mon, 29 Sep 2014 16:42:42 +0000
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