There is no place like home! I had the catheter ablation yesterday afternoon and so far it seems to have been a success. My resting heart rate has gone from 125bpm to 75bpm. I'm pretty sore "down there" but other than that they kept me very, very, very, comfortable. The usedd a combo of versed and some kind of short acting fentanyl (forgot the name now) with just a touch of propofol when they started zapping the misfiring electrical "doodads" in the heart. They also "found out" (which a lab report almost 2 months ago showed) is that I have slight hyprothyroidism and put me on a low dose of Synthroid. They reduced my Coumadin from 7.5mg to 5mg because my levels kept coming back in the high 3's (last one was 3.8), but since they dropped my Coumadin to under 2 to perform the procedure I have to give myself Lovenox injections again for the next 4 days. I will be on Coumadin until my followup appointment in about 4 weeks and they may stop it at that point if everything is looking good.
Man it's boring in a hospital when you aren't very sick. I had a computer but I clicked on one page and it said "sorry, you have reached the end of the world wide web and must start over again".
I'm not a big TV watcher but I did watch a little tennis, golf, and the World Series of College Baseball. I'm just glad to be out of there since they almost killed me on Tuesday night. I think my "official" low heart rate was 40bpm although I thought I saw a reading on my individual monitor that said 28bpm. Let's just say almost the entire nursing staff came into my room while I was sleeping like a baby and woke me up. They started asking me all kinds of questions...was I dizzy, did I have chest pains, etc. and all I could tell them was that I felt fine besides being woken up. The same thing happened within a half hour and they got the doctor that was on staff overnight and they gave me three 500ml bags of NS and pretty much gave the first one as a bolus (kept squeezing it to get it into me fast. I had taken my 360mg of Cardizem CD that morning before being admitted. Once admitted they changed the order to regular Cardizem 90mg every 6 hours. Well they ended up giving me 2 doeses of the 90mg Cardizem before bed so I had received a total of 540mg of Cardizem that day along with 2 does of 50mg Metoprolol. Actually I think my heart enjoyed the rest after beating at 125-145bpm over the last 2 months.
THAT WAS A SERIOUS MEDICATION ERROR. Still thinking about what I should do about it because I wasn't too far from being in some serious trouble.
But I'm out and things are working better so far besides having a very sore groin (on both sides) and some very sore arms (had 7-8 blood draws in 3 days not counting the saline lock).