Catching up - Part Two

It has rained for a couple of days now and that means that my rheumatoid arthritis “flares”. It is cold and damp and wet.

When we got back from Kentucky my defibrillator went off because I was going into ventricular tachycardia. My heart rate went to 230 before I got shocked, it went off a second time in the same week, and I began to have some heart issues that were somewhat relieved by nitro. I went to the ER at our hospital in TRF and they sent me by ambulance to Fargo. I was in the ICU for four days and my dear wife stayed with me the whole time sleeping in a chair and waiting on me. They put me on an IV nitro drip and almost immediately I was feeling pretty good again. When I left the hospital Dr. Ontaro, the cardiologist that handles pacemaker/defibrillator patients put me on a ne anti-arrhythmic drug called Pacerone. Well, it has about three pages of side effects and I developed most of them.

Sarah was leaving for Tennessee because she did not get to see her mother when we took our RV trip and my granddaughters Bryanna and McKenzie were celebrating their birthdays together. Well, I was not able to stay for the party but I did get to see them and give them their gifts. I went back on my oxygen generator and was pretty miserable for all of Labor Day weekend.

Sarah did have a wonderful visit with her mother, and her brother and sister-in-law came up with their two sons. She hadn’t seen her mother or her nephews in about ten years, so I was very happy that she didn’t cancel her trip. She also got to meet her grand-nephew Jay Carter DuRoy (who will always be Leroy DuRoy to me). He was born between the RV visit and her return to Tennessee. So she got to hold him while he was still very much a baby.

I gradually got better and now I just have extreme fatigue. Dr. Ashok Patel my regular doctor cut my dose in half and he said that in three or four weeks he might be able to halve it again.

We went to my 50th High School Class Reunion in the Cities and that was really fun, but I had to cut my visits short with some of the people that I had not seen since graduation because of my breathing. I had to go back on the generator.

However,we did get to spend some quality time with my granddaughters: Bryanna, Danielle, and McKenzie. That was fun because it had been a long time since we had a chance to have time enough to visit.


That’s all for now…and I promise that the next posting will be whine free!