Not. Even. Close.
Fear. Fear of loss can make you go a bit mad. Just spent a good part of a long and sleepless night staring straight into the eyes of that fear, that loss. The sleeplessness came from being thrust into thinking about loss, and thus the fear. While the loss contemplated could be seen as minor to many, silly by some, and certainly ranks low on the scale of actual human suffering in the world, the fear remains real.
Forced to look at something unimaginable, something never really considered or contemplated will keep you awake in the dark of night. Denial and optimism can be blown away like morning mist, replaced quickly by stormy clouds of realization and doubt.
This night of dark contemplation, realization and yes, fear was brought on courtesy of my arrhythmic heart and the joy that is modern medicine. Went in to get my long awaited and even anticipated Electrophysiology study and (hopefully) an RF ablation to bring my mis-behaving heart rates back under control. The Doctor's cheerful "70-80% confident we would get the issue and fix it on the first try" (foreshadowing…) ringing clearly in my head.
After a long day of no eating, no water, prepping & waiting, I woke up from the General anesthesia, became cognizant enough to remember where I was and what I was doing. First thing I asked my wife after becoming aware enough to ask was….. "did they fix it?". And of course the answer was…..
No.
NO? Shit.
Of course, while not out of the realm of possibility, was NOT what I had In mind. They were not able to reproduce the failure in over an hour of trying. Apparently he was able to provoke a whole three (3) lousy Tachycardic beats out of my heart, not nearly enough to map the defective paths and do an ablation.
Shit.
Thus, while getting to lay still for the desired 6 hours, and on to my overnight stay in the place where no sleep is had, being "observed", I managed to descend into a rather deep, dark funk. What the HELL am I going to do if I can't get this fixed? That kept running thru my head. Racing? Yea, I guess I can even see giving that up, since I pretty well suck at it anyway. But not being able to ride hard at all? Especially on the Mountain bike? Unimaginable. I like to ride places you just can't "ride easy" up. I ride with a bunch of folks who don't really race but still go FAST. Riding our tandem is HARD. I don't really want to be that putz-y, ride the easy stuff rider. I literally can not imagine NOT riding. It's too big of a piece of me.
After the requisite time of depression & self-loathing, I have pulled out a bit. We are FAR from done here, at the least there is the option of an additional try at the EP Study/Ablation, probably without the general anesthesia drugs depressing my system responses, and for that matter a slew of drugs to look into. Not done, but was not really planning on more months of waiting & trying here, I was ready to "be Fixed".
With my next Doc talk the day after Christmas (Merry Christmas to me!), we'll have a new plan in place in a couple of weeks. Whee. Till then, I am going to go ahead & "participate" in states again. Figure it can't hurt to get the arrhythmia "warmed up" and popping before the next attempt. Seems resting and being good didn't help with getting it to repeat, so we'll try and completely change the failure environment for the next round. What the hell.
See ya at states. The season end approaches.
Sorry for the self-centered ranting/whining. It just needed to come out. We return you to your regularly scheduled gibberish soon.
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