My latest fashion accessory is a Holter monitor, which is going to chart my heartbeats for twenty four hours. So I have should end up with a graph that shows the pauses and lurches it's been doing for the last few days.
I'm deep in the American medical system now, piling up specialists like crazy. But my cardiologist is a gem. During the consultation when I was in the ER, he prescribed beta blockers, and I had a day and a half before seeing him in his office to get worked up about not wanting to take them, and prepared myself for the usual fight. But no! He said now that he'd gotten a look at me -- and seen my more usual low blood pressure readings -- he changed his mind. No meds. Hoo-ray.
The gem of a cardiologist explains my lurching heart as being irritated by something. Could be the antibiotics, could be bacterial die-off, could be, well, anything. He says I can have as many as HALF of my heartbeats be irregular, and be all right. But it depends when they come. If they're all in a row, one after another...that's not good. So we want the irregularity to be irregular. As long as that's the case, eventually my heart is likely to settle down and cut it the heck out.
Meanwhile my Lyme doctor has stopped the antibiotic/antiprotozoan cycle I was in the middle of, and raised dosages of Neurontin and Ativan, in an attempt to calm my central nervous system down. I would have to say that's working, because right now, as I type, I am not actually awake. I am in some drifting drug haze somewhere apart from absolute consciousness. My heart seems to be doing fewer backflips. Or maybe I just can't pay enough attention to notice. I look like something from Lost in Space, and I am exactly that.
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