Death: The Sequel

Those of you who were loyal readers of The Cancer Blog during Vic's cancer experience may remember that the year before the cancer experience, he died.

Oh, you don't remember that? Read all about it here:

Death: The Prequel

Did you read it? Go ahead. I'll wait.

OK. So. Now you know he has a defibrillator. Which we hoped he would never use.

Wellllllllll, he used it.

On Sunday, he went out to do some watering. He began to feel a little dizzy—nothing new; he feels dizzy from time to time, like when he stands up fast or whatever—and then BAM! He felt like something punched him in the chest. "Weird," he thought. And then 10 second later, "Hey, I think my defibrillator shocked me!"

He came upstairs and told me his defibrillator shocked him, and I went into Grey's Anatomy mode, asking diagnostic questions that basically led us nowhere. Not knowing exactly what to do, I googled it. Because the Internet is nothing if not a repository for every useless fact you might ever want to know with no idea whether anything is true. And All-Knowing Google said to call the doctor, which we did.

The on-call doctor called back and, after ascertaining that Vic wasn't dead or (apparently) dying, he said to go to the emergency room. And that since the defibrillator went off, he wouldn't be able to drive for six months. Vic was unconcerned about going to the emergency room, but he let fly a string of expletives about the thought of not driving for six months.

Mary the nurse checked us in at the ER. She was very nice. She got Vic all set up on the machine that checks vital signs and then did an electrocardiogram (ECG, or if you watched Emergency! when you were younger, EKG). She showed it to the ER doc, who said someone from Biotronic, the company that makes the device, needed to come in and take a look at it. The Biotronic person lives in Lafayette (we were in Boulder), so we expected her in a half-hour or so.

A half-hour later, Mary Anne, the new nurse, came in to tell us she had taken over for Mary. A half-hour after that, nothing happened. A half-hour after that, nothing happened. A half-hour after that (this is now two hours for those of you who are math challenged), Mary Anne said the Biotronic person was five minutes away. Fifteen minutes later, she showed up. She did her device magic and determined that Vic had had a ventricular tachycardia (V-tach) episode. Without a defibrillator, this probably would have killed him.

Then she said that not only had he had this V-tach episode, but over the past month, he had had several V-tach episodes and some atrial fibrillation (A-fib) episodes as well! In some cases, they resolved on their own. In other cases, the pacemaker "paced" him out of the irregular rhythm. Until the last episode, when the defibrillator did its job.

"Congratulations," she said, "you just bought yourself a night in the hospital."

Mary Beth, from the hospital pharmacy, came in to find out what medications he would need. Apparently, you can't throw a bandage in the Boulder hospital without hitting someone named Mary.

At this point, we had been away from Wags for four hours. She is not used to being alone for long periods of time because Vic is usually home, so he was getting worried about her. She hadn't eaten before we left, and four hours is a long time to go without peeing. He said the best way I could take care of him was to take care of Wags, so I went home.

Wags was not happy that Vic did not come home with me. She stood in the garage for several minutes, apparently thinking that he was hiding. She finally decided to come inside, disappointed and depressed.

Although it's not really like me, let me make a long story short: Vic is fine. He came home from the hospital on Monday, and his doctor is adjusting his medication to prevent the recurrence of the V-tach incident. But the best news of all? NO RESTRICTIONS! So if you see Vic motoring around Longmont, it's OK. ;-)