Heart

So today at 8:30am, I had an MRI. It wasn’t as bad as last time, but it sure seemed louder somehow. The machine was much more recent–sporting a fancy LCD embedded into its doughnut badness–yet in the advancements it contained, apparently none of the engineers considered integrating sound dampening to avoid permanently deafening patents enclosed entirely within its grasping confines after repeated exposure to proximal squeals resembling a drunken hobo occasionally plucking the same frayed string on a “sweet” electric guitar he found jacked into a defective amp incapable of any setting below 100 decibels. And that was with the questionable headphones which conveyed sound through some archaic, almost steam-punk technology literally involving tubes muffling some insignificant fraction of the inescapable din. I was done at 11:30am. Hey! Only 3 hours! I’ll be invariably pestering them daily for a disk containing these gruesome movies so I can inflict the misshapen horror thrumming in my chest upon my friends and family.

Ugh! Fine, I’ll write something! Geez.

So the post-hurricane monsoon eventually hit Illinois and dumped copious amounts of fluid upon our hapless suburbs, and a friend of ours has an aunt and uncle living in dangerous proximity to a lake. Most of Saturday afternoon on the 12th was spent moving their furniture to the second floor and sandbagging his house, and we didn’t get home again until around 1am. Nothing really notable happened, but I was highly amused by the garter snake seeking high ground on a recently arranged sandbag; thankfully I didn’t step on any wildlife while wading through the knee-deep miasma back to Jen’s car.

Yeah, really I’m fine. Cardiologist gave me a quick look-over and pronounced the episode I had a couple weeks ago a fluke, but that I should keep an eye on it and report back to her if it happens again. In other news, she says my performance in the stress echo is “fantastic,” so there’s that.

Reports of my demise are highly exaggerated.

For those who haven’t heard, I paid a prolonged and unexpected visit to an emergency room on Wednesday. There I was, sitting at my desk doing some last-minute queries sipping a decaf iced coffee I’d acquired from Dunkin’ Donuts, when I’d started feeling somewhat odd. Not to be a worry-wart, I shrugged it off and continued banally pounding-out horrifying SQL resplendent with awe-inspiring and highly convoluted JOIN statements when my heart began pounding like I’d just finished a brisk 20-minutes playing DDR.

It’s too bad I don’t have a previous stress echo to compare this to, since I’ve never had one before.

Anyway, my appointment was scheduled for Wednesday 9am at Northwestern in Chicago. I got back to work around 1:30pm, and I was right, they spent a billionty years digging into my ribs and various other spots. They say my anatomy doesn’t seem to match my diagnosis, which is somewhat amusing. He knows how CC-TGA, JAA, and dextrocardia can go together, but it seems counter-intuitive. But they found what they think were the correct atria and ventricles, so they think it’s ok. The doctor overseeing the echo wants me to pester UC for the MRI disk and anything else they’ve neglected to send… I guess hospitals in this area are generally terrible about forwarding records.