A bit of back story (and by "a bit" I mean "years and years condensed into a somewhat reasonably sized paragraph or two"): When I was about 10 or 11, I started having fainting spells which I would follow up with a lovely seizure. It's not like they happened all the time; maybe once or twice a year. I could feel them coming on for about 15 minutes beforehand and was right as rain within a half hour after, and the seizures would only last about 20 seconds. It wasn't really a big deal until I had an episode during my flight from Toronto to Regina for a week-long dance workshop. Trust me when I say having a seizure on an airplane is not fun. Glass half full, I got to be first off the plane when we landed.
In high school I was tested for epilepsy, but that wasn't it. Then for about five years I was faint-free. Unfortunately, this past summer I relapsed (for lack of a better word). My family doctor referred me to a cardiologist who then referred me to another cardiologist. Since the fall, I've had an electrocardiogram, two stress tests, two echocardiograms, a cardiac MRI, and most recently an electrophysiology study.
Okay, so this post is a bit of an unrelated tangent from my blog's central theme, but it's been a while since my last post and just because I can't pole at the moment doesn't mean I can't write about it (kind of).
The EP study was the reason classes were postponed Tuesday night. My procedure was scheduled at the Southlake Regional Health Centre in Newmarket. They told me to check in by 11am, so my mom and I arrived around 10:15 and the nurse got me all set up with an IV, filled out forms for my chart, etc. We then proceeded to wait in Visitors' Waiting for hours and hours and hours until they finally called me in. Of course, they only called me into the patient waiting room, where I then waited for another hour or so. I made it into the procedure room around 4pm. The test itself went well, but because it went so late, Dr. Verma (my cardiologist) was heading home before all the post-procedure ECGs were finished being run and I ended up being held overnight. I don't mind all the medical tests (although they drive me to extreme frustration when nothing comes back conclusively), but I do not like spending the night in the hospital. In the end, it was a good thing they kept me; an hour or so after my mom left, I got nauseous and threw up, which caused the incision point to start bleeding (femoral artery, so not the best place from which to bleed), and a few hours after that it started bleeding a second time.
After all that, there were still no conclusive results, so Dr. Verma got me set up for a tilt table test in a couple weeks. I guess we'll see where things go from there.
Attempting to bring this back around to the pole theme, I had to miss my Wednesday class this week. not that I really felt like going anyway. My leg is stiff and sore, I'm still exhausted and I have a bruise the size of my hand at the top of my thigh. The last time I had a bruise this size was after Tylar twisted me into my first superman. And that experience was a lot more fun! I like to consider my bruises trophies of hard work and new tricks, but this one is only a trophy of involuntary patience* and one hell of a cardiac mystery.
*Just an interesting little tidbit: the word "patient" originates from the Latin word for "suffering". Learning this fact, however, does nothing to clarify whether it was first used as in "someone seeking medical aid" or as in "having to wait for an obscene amount of time".
