From Plan A to Plan B

So way back when I was in the hospital (the 3rd time, not the 1st or 2nd), it took forever for the medical team to come up with a plan on how to treat me. My sarcoid was very very angry and my heart was inflamed. I was loaded up on steroids to reduce the inflammation. Once that was all under control and the VT was happening on a less frequent basis, it could be determined what to do with me. Since there are not a lot of cases like mine out there, there is not a prescribed course of action. After much debate, and I can imagine that that is an understatement, it was decided, collectively by said medical team, that the course of action, heretofore known as Plan A, would be to give me a medication that had antiarrhythmic properties. That is to say, give him a pill to stop the VT from happening.

Plan A worked. They gave me the drug and followed me for a couple of days in the hospital to make sure it suppressed the VT and didn't present any harmful side effects. It all seemed good and that's when they booted me from the hospital after eleven long days.

So, Gina and I our on our way to the Heart Failure Clinic for a check up to see how I have been doing since I left the hospital. Its about 9:10 when we park the car and start walking to the Anschutz Inpatient Medical Pavilion. I get a little winded and dizzy during that short walk. I chalk it up to my meds kicking in (I just took all my medications an hour or so before). The new drug they gave me, the antiarrhythmic, is also a beta-blocker which can lower the blood pressure so that what I think is going on, my BP is just low. I saw that it was low in the hospital and just assumed it was low still and that's whats making me a little dizzy. It surely did not feel like I was having any VT.

So we check in and shortly get called to go to the device clinic where they interrogate the implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD). They put some EKG stickers on you and hook you up to the portable computer, then put a plastic doughnut looking thing over the ICD and start the download of info from the ICD to the computer. At this point the Tech leaves the room to go get some adhesive remover because she see all the EKG glue still all over my chest and wanted me to have some stuff to get it off later. That was very nice because I have a lot of that crap still on me and it doesn't come off easy. While she is gone the computer starts spewing out paper of whats been going on in my device since it was last interrogated. The last date of interrogation was that fateful day the eve of Halloween 2008. So needless to say there is a lot of stuff being printed. Gina and I are both pretty knowledgeable about how to read these print outs. I kinda want to wait and have the tech or doc tell us whats up but we look anyway.

And what do you think we see? We see that I had about 4 episodes of VT walking into the mother loving hospital that morning! Can you believe that? There were a couple other VT episodes a couple days earlier too. Holy Cow! Plan A is not working...

Next we meet with the good Dr B and he doesn't look too happy to tell me Plan A is not working. But we still have Plan B. We are going to continue Plan A but now we are also gonna do Plan B.

Plan B is Ablation. Ablation is a regular old word that you can use in you day to day life when you want to say that you are going to remove material from on object by means of chipping, vaporization or some other erosive processes. However, in my particular case it means that a week from today I will have 3 EP doctors standing over me for 8 to 10 hours, mapping out my hearts electrical system, looking for areas where the VT is propagating from, by actually getting the VT to happen and ablating those areas by burning them. Yeah that's Plan B. That's whats next.