P.P.P.P.P.T.* So, I ended up in the hospital, again, a few weeks ago. (I could have written about it earlier, but — Slow Blogging!**)

I was at the local gym, lifting weights. This is something I've been trying to do about twice a week since December, when we got a gym membership, and I'd been keeping up fairly well, though there were inevitable breaks in the routine, like running off to D.C. for a week-plus. Perhaps I should have reduced the weight a little after that break; anyway, I didn't, and just about at the end of the workout I suddenly felt just beat. Really, really exhausted, out of all proportion (I thought) to what I was doing. I stopped and went into the locker room, mostly just to find a place to sit down.

As I sat on the locker room bench, I started feeling worse – completely out of breath, and faint. Chartreuse-and-magenta flashes started to show up all over my field of vision. I put my head down, closed my eyes, and waited... the gym pipes music into the locker rooms, a cavalcade of pop hits of the 70's and 80's. Material Girl played, then I Love the Nightlife, making me feel even worse. Some of the other gym regulars had come in by then, and were asking, in their circumspect way, if I was all right.

"Ah, you okay, there?"

"Just really dizzy and out of breath. I think I'll be ok in a minute."

"Well, ok." One of the regulars handed me an orange juice (I think I told him I hadn't eaten anything yet). I thanked him for it and drank.

After about ten minutes, I did start to feel better, and in a few more minutes, pretty much normal. I got up, showered and dressed. As I left the gym, two of the patrons who'd been checking on me in the locker room were waiting by the door, making sure I hadn't collapsed somewhere.

"Now, you be sure you see your doctor. This could be something serious."

"Yes, I will." Actually, I had no intention of that; I felt pretty much ok, and really didn't want to spend any more time in the emergency room. I thanked them again for looking out for me, and headed to the car.

I started up the mighty Saturn, and as I was pulling out of the parking lot it occurred to me that something felt odd in my chest, like I had a whole bunch of butterflies caged in there. Hmm, that's odd, I thought. I checked my carotid pulse; there should be a slight, steady, rythymic THUMP thaTHUMP thaTHUMP thaTHUMP beneath the skin just below and medial to the angle of the jaw. What I felt was more like:

thump thump (pause) THUMPTHUMPTHUMP thump (pause) thump THUMPTHUMPTHUMP thumpthump

...so I drove straight to the hospital, and walked to the emergency room, where they wired me up to an ECG (again!). "You're in atrial fibrillation", the ER doctor told me. Sweet.

Not only that, but the combination of reduced blood to the ventricles and chaotic electrical signals bouncing around the heart caused my ventricles to beat much faster than usual – my pulse was racing up to about 160. I borrowed a phone and called Moira. "I'm in the hospital again."

They stuck an IV into me and started pumping in a drug to calm my jittery heart down. I asked the ER doctor what the general plan was in cases like this. "Well, we want to restore normal rythym. We'll try this drug for a while, and if that doesn't work, we'll try another drug, and if that doesn't work, we'll have to shock you."

This was the second time in less than three months that I managed to get myself into the emergency room because of cardiac weirdness. It's enough to make me question my overall state of healthiness, which back in December I would have classified as "excellent". Then, one bout of angina, ok, that's a fluke. Now, a good hearty workout lands me in the hospital; WTF? (I say again, "WTF?")

(More later.)

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*Residents' and interns' slang for a patient in chronic ill health – "Piss-Poor Protoplasm Poorly Put Together."

**Maybe that term needs to be shortened for maximum punchiness – "Slogging", perhaps.

Posted by David Fleck at 20 April 2008 07:40 AM