For years I have been told my heart was having "PVC's" Premature Ventricular Contractions, a condition when your heart has extra beats between normal beats when your heart is actually beating with no blood in the heart chamber to pump. I have been on different meds to try to control this but none worked. For some reason it seems that after I had Covid 19 or after I was vaccinated for Covid 19, the PVCs worsened.
One day when I was talking to Barb Shelby as we were standing in her front yard after talking about the claim on their home after it was struck by lightning, the topic of my slow heart rate came up. After listening to me talk about my heart rate Barb wisely suggested that I tell my cardiologist that I should wear a heart monitor for 30 days to keep track of all the weird stuff my heart seems to do. Barb informed me that based on what I had told her I already had 50% of the requirements for a pacemaker.
When I saw my Cardiologist, who is at the top of his class, he readily agreed that I needed the 30 day monitor. At that very visit I was given that device and instructed what to do when certain things seem to be going on with me and my heart. When certain things happen I was to press a button on the device that would send a signal to the monitoring company and then I should write down what kind of episode I was having so that I could review it later with my Dr. For the first 26 or 27 days everything was ok. No problems, but on one of the last days to wear the monitor, I was suddenly feeling very poorly. Going up seven steps took all the energy I had and left me winded. I was not dizzy, I felt no pain but knew something was not right. After a few minutes I decided to push the button on the monitor and write down that I was short of breath. I told Vicki I was not sure what was wrong but I just did not feel good. This was a statement she had heard many times since I had been infected with Covid. After a little while past I felt better and went about my normal activities.
Later on in the day I noticed on my phone I had a missed call that had left me a voicemail. When the call had initially came in and I noticed it was from California and I just assumed it was one of those annoying Medicare calls. When I listened to the voicemail I found out it was from the heart monitor company wanting me to contact them. I assumed it was because I had pressed the button on the heart monitor when I was having an episode. I tried to call them back but was on hold for several minutes until I drove through an area with no cell service and was disconnected so I lost my place in the phone cue. I then had to call back and was on hold again for over 30 minutes when I decided I had waited long enough so I hung up. Several hours later after Vicki and I had eaten dinner, I was thinking about that call and decided I should call it again. This time I was patched through to a the rep who immediately asked me how I was feeling. I told him I felt fine and asked him why he would ask. He informed me "You were experiencing a serious episode with your heart and your heart rate went to over 180 beats per minute for a time."
I told him that I knew something was wrong and that is why I pushed the button on the heart monitor. He informed me that the heart monitor had sent the message and it's own well before I had pushed the button. He also told me that they had alerted my doctor and that the Dr office would be contacting me.
The next morning I received a call from the Cardiac Clinic at the hospital telling me that they had scheduled me an appointment at the clinic with the Cardioligist in the group who is the electrician. Apparently as cardiologists go, there are plumbers and there are electricians.
My appointment was the next morning. When I met this cardiologist for the first time, I could see when he walked in the room by the look on his face that he was very concerned. With no small talk or any beating around the bush, he informed me that my condition was very serious. He said the I had had a
Ventricular Tachycardia episode that had lasted for 30 seconds, (apparently a very long time) and that often time it would cause your heart to stop and that would be the end. He paused to stop and look down at the floor as he sat on the edge of the bed across from me pondering what to do. For a brief moment he did not speak nor did I, but the thought of what could have happened raced through my head. As far as I could remember this was the only near death experience I could remember happening to me, at least for awhile. I later found out that a mere 4 beats of your heart when you are inVT is enough to stop your heart. My heart was in VT at the rate of 180 beats per minute for 30 seconds. According to him this could happen again at any time and as I recalled what it felt like when it was happening, I was pretty sure this was not the first time it had happened which made me realize that I had had other near death experiences and did not even know it. According to the doctor an ablation might be what I needed to take care of the situation but it would be a few weeks before it could be done.
An “ablation” is a process in which they go into your heart and find which nerves are telling your heart to beat out of rythym, and they deaden those nerves and hopefully your heart goes back into the pace that it should be in.
I could not get that done immediately, so I needed to get a defibrillator put in my chest so that if my heart stopped it would "jump start" my heart and get me going again. Some describe that feeling as that of being kicked in the chest by a mule. I must tell you that the guy writing this used to nearly pass out when getting a flu shot, so you can imaging how I felt when being given all this info. Suddenly all your priorities get realigned as you try to continue to grasp for every chance at life that you have. After my continued pursuit of getting this Defibrillator installed, it was determined (with considerable pushing on my part) that he could put it in two days later.
To make a long story even longer, the defibrillator was successfully implanted two days later and then I begun what seemed to be the long wait of having the Ablation which would hopefully put an end to my problem.
I must say that as I laid in bed in the hospital after having the ablation, and looked up at the monitor and saw a perfect heart rhythm without a single PVC, I knew God had his hand all over my situation. If I had not been talking to Barb Shelby about all these problems, and if she had not suggested what she did, and if the cardiologist had not been so willing to take her suggestion of the 30 day monitor, if the implementation of the defibrillator had not been changed from a few weeks away until 2 days away, and if the Cardiac Ablation had not been changed from the original 30 days or so after the Defibrillator implementation until November 30, who knows where I would be,
possibly not here at all! I was told by my neice,who has been a registered nurse and even Head Nurse in a large hospital at one time, when I was giving her the play by play of what had been going on, she said that I was a "ticking time bomb". How many people are walking the streets right now with the same problem I had and don't even know it because it does not cause pain and very few symptoms, or at least in my case it did not. Too many things have happened during my experience to just call it happenstance. I am sure God has been telling me, "I am not through with you yet'. I can tell you from experience that God hears your prayers. He may answer in many different ways but He hears your prayers. I have experienced it, and I can feel it everyday, and to that I must exclaim, “God is Good and Jesus Saves".