To be honest, today marks 22 days since my CARDIAC EVENT!
Sorry, I had to put an exclamation point after it. Those are big, important words, and I'm too sarcastic and snarky not to try to work them for laughs in some way. I mean, if I don't laugh about this I'm likely to cry a bit.
How am I doing? Well, I'm not doing so bad. I'm more tired than I'd like to be - as in, I will literally just NEED to take a nap and there's no negotiating about it. For instance, one of our doggos was not feeling well and we were worried that she had some kind of intestinal blockage so we took her to the urgent veterinary care center yesterday. Since we live about ten clicks from the middle of nowhere that meant a drive into Concord and a full day expended waiting for the vet to figure out what was going on. By the time we got back home (doggie is fine, by the way) I sat down on the sofa, leaned over to half-assedly lie down and crashed for the next hour.
This was not a choice. I simply crashed.
Then there's my right hand.
Here's a peek behind the curtain for those of you who have never had a heart attack - when they wheel you into the ER it's not like any other experience you've likely had with a hospital. You're not going to wait for anything. They will zip you into a procedure room and immediately start prepping you for surgery because there's something like a one-to-one relationship between a heart attack and a blocked artery. The heart is misbehaving because it's not getting oxygen and nutrients because one of the branch arteries that feeds it both is blocked in some way. So they do what's called a cardiac catheterization that's got two objectives: 1) determine which artery is blocked and how badly and 2) open it back up with a stent if needed.
To prep you for the cardiac cath they prep your wrists and groin. The cardiac cath is a tube they insert into your artery, and they'd rather do that through your wrist because it's a shorter trip to the heart and also has less chance of complications on down the road. They prep both because if they have any trouble at all feeding the catheter into your wrist they will go in through the groin. From what I understand, the groin entry is far more prone to healing poorly or getting infected. Glad they were able to use my wrist.
In my case the diagonal branch artery is where the blockage is. And it was so severe they decided trying to open it back up was more risky than leaving it be, and it's a rather minor supplier of oxygen and nutrients to the heart muscle, so no stent for Joe. So far so good. Except my hand is messed up a little.
The wrist is full of tightly packed nerves. Priority was preventing another heart attack and making sure I did not have significant damage to my heart, not protecting those nerves. I've got a bit of nerve damage, which manifests itself as tightness, tingling and pain in my right hand. I've also noticed a little bit of lost dexterity. Swell.
All things being equal, glad to be alive and all that, but it's a bit sucky dooty right now when I try to play guitar or bass. I can still play, but my hand doesn't obey my brain exactly the way I want it to most of the time. Was sort of hoping for some impact to my ability to type (since that's a thing I have to do for bleah yucky work stuff) but no dice. Typing doesn't seem to be impacted. Fooey.