Up at 0430 yesterday for an 0600 show at Tucson Medical Center. My AFIB came back (previous post), 14 months after it was first treated at TMC, both times by cardioversion. That’s the procedure where they shock your heart with electrical paddles (à la every Frankenstein movie you’ve seen). Donna, bless her, was my designated driver and cheering squad/companion.
My heartbeat’s once again back to normal, but my cardiologist wants to go a step further and have me undergo an ablation. A cardioversion works for a while, while the more invasive ablation — where they run a probe through your veins and into your heart in order to burn the tissue causing the arrhythmia — is permanent. Or is it? My youngest sister, who also has AFIB and has undergone an ablation, says sometimes they have to do it twice, which I confess troubles me. Anyway, there’s a post-cardioversion follow-on with the cardiologist on St. Patrick’s Day, and then I’ll know more about getting the ablation.
When did the AFIB come back? I don’t know. I wasn’t experiencing symptoms, not even shortness of breath. The cardiologist’s nurse practitioner picked it up in late January, during one of my twice-yearly checkups. I suppose I could get an Apple watch to monitor my heartbeat (you knew I’d get wristwatches involved in this somehow, didn’t you) but that would mean not wearing the regular watches in my collection and I don’t want to abandon them. Donna was rooting around on Amazon this morning and found a bathroom scale with a heart-monitoring function that works with an iPhone app, and that seems a happier solution. I can keep wearing my precious mechanical and quartz analog watches and still check my heart rate every day, yay!
My treatment at TMC, as before, was fantastic. As it must have been for the dozen or so other heart patients who were there with us, a mix, as far as we could tell, of regular people with Medicaid or workplace health coverage, and older folks on Medicare. In the recovery room with Donna afterward, we thought about what we’d do without medical coverage. Keep going until whatever wants to kill us kills us? That’s pretty much how it is for most people on this planet. We wondered long it’ll be before good medical care in this country is reserved for the wealthy only. We tried to imagine what hospitalization must be like in present-day Kiev, or god forbid Gaza.
Our son Gregory had business in Phoenix on Wednesday and offered to drive down to Tucson to have lunch with us. That’s a two-hour haul on an awful freeway clogged with truck traffic, so we countered with an offer to meet him halfway in Casa Grande. Curiously, it took us an hour-and-a-half to get to Casa Grande from Tucson, ditto for Gregory to get there from the airport in Phoenix. Don’t ask why because I don’t know the answer.
Polly had a job interview and couldn’t come with us. We sampled the chiles rellenos at Mi Amigo Ricardo, a Mexican restaurant recommended by friends who know Casa Grande (locals hereabouts … you know the kind I mean … pronounce it “Kassa Grand”) and had a good visit with Gregory. We’ll be up his way (Las Vegas) in October for our granddaughter Taylor’s wedding, and Donna may work in a solo visit next month, traveling with an elderly friend who doesn’t fly and otherwise would be making the eight-hour drive alone.
Our family Christmas gift was a bird feeder cam, which I installed under our patio, facing the back yard. Earlier this week, we finally started getting non-hummingbird traffic, specifically a female Mexican house finch (Haemorhous mexicanus) who has now been back several times. Until now, you see, our only visitors have been a pair of hummingbirds and a tiny lesser goldfinch (Spinus psaltria) more interested in the hummingbird’s nectar than the seed. It can’t be long until other birds start dropping by. Here’s the house finch on her inaugural visit:
Haemorhous mexicanus? Spinus psaltria? Damn right I look up Latin names. That’s half the fun. I always remember this passage from Vladimir Nabokov’s great novel Pale Fire:
My knowledge of garden Aves had been limited to those of northern Europe but a young New Wye gardener, in whom I was interested (see note to line 998), helped me to identify the profiles of quite a number of tropical-looking little strangers and their comical calls; and, naturally, every tree top plotted its dotted line toward the ornithological work on my desk to which I would gallop from the lawn in nomenclatorial agitation. How hard I found to fit the name “robin” to the suburban impostor, the gross fowl, with its untidy dull-red livery and the revolting gusto it showed when consuming long, sad, passive worms!
Nomenclatorial agitation. I know it well.
Stay fresh, cheese bags!