Recently, I shared my experience with V-Tach (runaway heart beats), my hospital stay (Fox News scares me by how much it wants to scare me) and receiving a defibrillator, my own crash-cart to carry around in my chest for the rest of my life.
link: http://www.dailykos.com/...
I have to have surgery again tomorrow (Thursday) because something is wrong with the lead into my heart. My last few days of recovery has to be a Mulligan. I have to do a do-over.
I was quietly reading dailykos on Tuesday morning. As I've cut back on taking Vicodin for pain, I've been able to read more and more. Fascinating side effect. Anyway, my defibrillator went off in my chest like a cell phone that's been set to "vibrate." I am intellectually ready for the day that this thing goes off to kick start my heart but I wasn't ready for it to hum at me.
I called my doctor to ask, "Is this normal?" (Gee, what question was I not asking?) He told me to come in so that they could run diagnostics on the machine. So I went in and a technician, who dresses better than I ever will- take note of that those of you who are looking into careers- ran some tests on me that required little more than me pressing my hands together. He printed out the results and said he was going to pass them along to my doctor. He added that I had done exactly the right thing; that little hum in my chest is a built-in warning signal that something is wrong with the defibrillator. They don't know what it is except the problem is located in the lead that pokes down into my heart. Once again I am a rarity; these things shouldn't happen but "like anything else man-made," sometimes it comes up. It could be as little as torn insulation due to a slightly too tight suture when they closed me up.
In the spirit of dailykos, however, I have decided to blame the competing diaries about Bill O'Reilly and this hate-filled blog, welcoming Fox viewers (they'll get bored with us quickly because we won't scare them all the time), whether-or-not kossacks should even talk to Republicans (Geez, go read Al Gore's book already and accept that rational discourse, even argument, is healthy and sane) and the big tease over who is running for Congress in CA-42, the district where my one daughter goes to high school (voting age next year!) and the other plays soccer (Thanks for the invitation to Drinking Liberally, Ron, but this Thursday is just not do-able). All that and the thought that there are graduate students out there who are eating cans of corn for dinner (you know who you are; did you buy the stupid toilet plunger like I told you before? Honestly, some of you need me to be your Dad more than anything else...).
So y'all keep talking amongst yourselves. Resist the temptation to kidnap a young white woman or shave Lindsey Lohan's head so that you can get major media time to explain what a filibuster is and how the vote was actually won but just not by enough.
And I'm really looking forward to knowing who is going to liveblog at each and every single one of the Yearlykos panels so that those of us who can't be there can know what's going on. Or am I being to subtle?