I am STILL HERE

I went to the emergency room on Friday.

Heart rate repeatedly 37 beats per minute. Heart failure is imminent at that low rate.

I was wheeled directly to the intensive care unit. A temporary pacemaker was immediately shoved through a vein in my hip directly to my heart.

Of course, they don’t settle for that. Once my heart stabilized, they switched the pacemaker off again, thinking it was a side-effect of my blood pressure medicine that caused the problem. It was. My heart beat normally for eight hours. Then my heart rate got bad again in the night. The pacemaker was switched back on, stabilizing me until morning. Sunday morning, they turned it back off again. I stayed stable for another few hours, and they told me they would take the temporary pacemaker out again and send me home on Monday. My body had recovered from the side effects.

But my heart had other ideas… at the same time of night as the previous bad night started.

They left the thing off for the rest of the night, and without telling me ahead of time, they scheduled me for a permanent pacemaker.

I actually spent a lot of that night thinking I was going to die. I saw the number 37 again, and I knew they weren’t being honest with me about what was going to happen.

But Monday morning brought a serious surgery. And they control the pain, but you have to be conscious for that implant surgery. That was a wonderful experience I hope never to have to go through again. But I probably will.

Life is simply poetry.

So, why do I live my life in prose?

Because I am intensely didactic,

Is the reason, as I suppose.

And that’s the ordinary level

At which I drink from Life’s firehose.