I suppose . . .

Puppy Sitting

I went to my follow up appointment after wearing a heart monitor for the month of May. It took almost two hours of waiting before the doctor came in; he did chastise me a bit for leaving the examination room to ask if they had forgotten me! He said that he had many patients on this day in particular who needed a lot of education and I was one of them and so he would be late for his next appointment too. I told him it was okay as long as he hadn’t been drinking coffee and snacking. He said no, he’d been with the dancing girls. I cracked up.  Then he did explain what CIS (Cardiovascular Institute of the South) was trying to do in my case. The insurance would not pay for the five year loop recorder he wanted to install on me unless they had already done the one month monitor. So now that the one month monitor did not prove that I have atrial fibrillation he wants the five year monitor because he doesn’t want me on Coumadin, a blood thinner,  as they’re not sure if it’s worth the risk because of the bad side effects. The neurologist had put me on a whole baby aspirin to try to ward off possible heart infarctions; Dr. Thompson said the aspirin might help some but not enough and my stomach doesn’t like the whole aspirin so I’m taking one half daily. Since they know I’ve had a TIA at some point, they don’t want anymore of them, but they also don’t want to risk the strong blood thinning medicines therefore the five year loop recorder will keep track of what my heart is doing and let Dr. Thompson know by sending messages to his inbox if my heart is misbehaving and they need to intervene in some way to prevent a stroke. I’m not certain I’ve explained this correctly. But I am certainly willing to do as he suggests because I’ve seen what strokes can do to people and I sure as heck don’t want one. So as long as my new insurance okays the loop recorder it will be injected into the left side of my chest and I’ll have a small monitor to put near my bed that will send out the heart information. I don’t have to do anything but show up at the Cath Lab in Zachary and I don’t even need someone to drive me! Pretty cool. I needed to write this down so I can remember what the Doctor said and to prove to myself that my brain is still working okay!

Quote:  Doctor, no medicine. ___We are machines made to live___organized expressly for that purpose.__Such is our nature.__Do not counteract the living principle.__Leave it at liberty to defend itself, and it will do better than your drugs.___Napoleon (Not bad, Napoleon!)