Not Quite What I Expected…

Tuesday, June 3rd — The long weekend in Toronto was fantastic! The birthday party was so much fun! My daughter-in-law had made me a scrapbook, with letters from loads of friends and family, and my sister had made an album titled, “Time Flies When You’re Having Fun!” containing pictures from times throughout my life and before, beginning with photos of my grandparents and parents in their youth, and ending with my wedding photo from January 1996. I looked around at the tables full of people I loved, and thought how incredibly fortunate I was to have THIS family, and THESE friends, and others who weren’t able to make the trip to Toronto. I am really blessed.

I should have realized, though, that every time you think you’ve got it made, every time you’re riding the crest, Life is going to come up behind you and kick you in the butt, just to remind you that You’re Not The Boss!  The butt-kick I received went like this.  We were supposed to fly home late Tuesday afternoon. Monday noon, while we were eating onion soup in Casey’s Grill and planning to see the new Narnia movie with the grandkids after school, Life snuck in and delivered the kick.

Robert was pontificating about something or other — I think it was about homeless people — and all of a sudden he grabbed the table with both hands, stopped in the middle of a word with his mouth open, and froze for about four seconds. Then he shook himself like a dog just out of the swimming pool, and announced, “I just converted.”  I thought that was pretty sudden for a religious experience, and sure enough, what he meant was not that he had Seen the Light.  Apparently, people who experience atrial fibrillation (wildly erratic heart rhythms) often reach a point where the heartbeat slows so much that they feel it has actually stopped beating. Then suddenly it kicks in again, and the rhythm is normal for a while. They refer to this as “conversion,” or — in Canada — “reversion.”  And that’s what had happened to my beloved spouse.

To make a long story short, he was admitted to an Emergency ward after having an EKG that was quite abnormal. He spent 34 hours in Emergency, then was taken to the cardiac intensive care unit for another couple of days. His heart rate was way low, and there was some talk of putting in a pacemaker immediately. That was replaced by readjusting his medications, and by Thursday afternoon he was stable enough for us to fly back to San Diego on Friday afternoon.

Yesterday, Monday, he had made an appointment with Dr. Klein. We both went along to Seaside Chiropractic, me for my usual fairly short adjustment, and him for (I hoped) his first actual adjustment by DK. After that, we were to visit his cardiologist and see what he wanted to do about the pacemaker idea. However, there were lots of people in the office, and DK was really busy; so the time went by, and went by, and my beloved spouse got edgier and edgier. I had my brief adjustment while Robert was meeting with Roseanna and learning what would be happening. We waited some more in the waiting room. All of a sudden Robert stood up and announced that he was leaving. And out he went. What I didn’t realize was that he was in pain again, having more of that arrhythmia that was so troublesome, and becoming more and more anxious as it went on. I was pretty embarrassed, and very annoyed that he would storm out without even seeing DK.  BUT… the plot thickens…

Forty minutes later, there he is, on the table in the cardiologist’s office, and the nurse is attaching electrodes for an EKG, when all of a sudden he goes into atrial fibrillation again.  The EKG needle is jumping all over the place, and the nurse is saying, “Hey! What the heck is going on here?”  She calls the doctor, who comes in and takes a look, and tells us, “Well, we’re going to have to squeeze you in for a pacemaker tomorrow afternoon!”

Now, as I write, I’ve just spoken to the cardiologist. Thanks to a big dose of Versed, my beloved spouse is stoutly claiming that he has had no surgery, and wondering when it’s going to happen, when in actuality he is in the recovery room, and all has gone well. The pacemakers they use these days are no longer the cigarette-pack-size I remember seeing once some years back. Now they are hardly bigger than a silver dollar, and contain, as the cardiologist told us, “more technology than the Hubble space station!”

It was the visit with Dr. Klein that wasn’t quite what I expected. I had thought DK would be able to work on Robert for some time, over weeks and months, maybe loosening free the nerves that are probably caught tightly in subluxations, and that first his neck pain and then his cardiac arrhythmia would slowly show improvement. And then I could say, “See? I TOLD you chiropractic was amazingly effective!”  And we would all smile happily and eat some cookies together. End of beautiful story.

How dopey was that, to expect it to work out the way it ought to have worked? How dopey was I, at my advanced age, even to entertain the thought?

How unfortunate, that now that beautiful story is probably not going to happen.  Well, it is what it is, as my yoga teacher says.

And my beloved spouse is more comfortable than he’s been in a long time, and that can only be a good thing.

Thanks for reading — Betsy