PILL POPPIN POPPA
It’s now 5:13 a.m., not quite the Hour of the Wolf (see my blog on Bergman’s death for an explanation), but bad enough. For the past year, I haven’t had more than three hours of good sleep a night, due to pain in my right hip and thigh. Arthritis, massive arthritis. The first of two planned total hip replacements is scheduled for March 23.
As part of the preparation for that Blessed Event, I had a physical examination with my family physician, former Vermont Physician of the Year Dr. William Barrett. His nurse did an electrocardiogram, and Barrett deciphered atrial fibrillation—disorganized heartbeats in which the input part isn’t coordinated well with the output part (auricles and ventricles, if you remember bio class). His office wangled an asap appointment with a heart specialist.
This gentleman turned out to be former Gov. Madeleine Kunin’s son. He determined that it wasn’t the most severe kind of “A-Fib,” as those in the know call it (the pattern didn’t show up on his office’s EKG), meaning it should response to medication. I’m taking dronedarone now, and my heart feels a lot stronger already.
The drug name means “That drone Ed is still going to be around.” Having fallen into the once-dreaded condition in which interactions between medications might worsen the interaction between syndromes, I’m reminded of a bit of Theodore Roethke light verse titled “Academic:”
The
stethoscope tells what everyone fears:
You're
likely to go on living for years,
With
a nurse-maid waddle and a shop-girl simper,
And the style of your prose growing limper and limper.
Of course the hip situation, which has me hobbling and bobbling like someone 20 years older, hasn’t let me get enough exercise. Bed rest is dangerous, hospitals warn—and deskwork, too, I’d add. Though right now I’d be glad to get a little bed rest.
What with replacements for the missing endocrine glands, restless leg syndrome, and miscellaneous stuff, I’m now taking a truly bizarre assortment of pills three time s day, always with food to avoid stomach problems, which doesn’t help the weight situation. Thanks to a substandard metabolism I’m currently around 260 pounds and have been over 300. Which leads to the next problem.
The cause of the heart problem may be sleep apnea, periods of not breathing and suddenly gasping for breath, which may have been worsened by having to sleep on my back at times to keep the hip and leg pain down to a level at which I could at least stay in bed, even if it wasn’t good sleep. Before I can get the hip operated on, I need to do a sleep study at a sleep lab, where the wire you up to a bunch of monitors and say “Now try to sleep.” I’ve done this before, and it showed sleep apnea so bad that I had a throat operation to take out all the tonsils, adenoids, etc. that hadn’t been removed when I was a kid.
And the heart doctor is going to put me on blood pressure medication, since my rates keep going to the upper end of the normal range and slightly beyond, according to statistical surveys. I’ve been hoping for this for some time, because I know what my system is capable of doing. Back in the Seventies, I weighed 170 pounds, had blood pressure of 104 over 58, and my resting pulse was about 40. That won’t come again, but with any luck neither will 140 over 90.
Would I have a problem taking another kind of medication? I answered by quoting my original photographic mentor back in college, who was schizophrenic as well as brilliant: “What’s another crater to the moon?”
Younger brother Walt died of a heart attack in his 50s. So did Roethke. Give me dronedarone, or give me death!