Looking forwards and backwards

Early next Monday--the 30th of June--I'm going to drive across Austin to Seton Hospital. There, I'll have a device called an ICD installed in my chest. The reason for the procedure is to correct an arhythmia in my heart that could have killed me, had I not been told to go to a hospital by my doctor while I was on vacation in New Mexico last month.

I look forward to having this gizmo, which serves the same purpose as the paddles you see on the doctor shows on TV ("Clear!!!"), because it'll monitor my heart and give me a gentle (I hope) zap if anything goes wrong. 

I'm going to try to piece together a narrative about how things got to this point while I recover and get used to the idea of having a piece of technology a little bigger than a 9 Volt battery in my chest. The future looks good with these devices, so I want speculate about what the future might hold. 

Until then, I'm taking the weekend off. 

Some vacation! Part 1.

I love New Mexico, and so does my spouse. She loves the quiet and getting away from her job. I like to rest. We stay at a place called Casita de Chuparrosa in Aboqueue, which is about 40 miles north of Santa Fe. Marilyn and her son Jeff run the place so well that we just drop our bags and start decompressing as soon as we get there,

This year, we were leaving on Memorial Day, Monday. 

I had been taking an anti-bacterial drug called Cipro for a persistent infection in my upper chest. I'd walked off the Queen Elizabeth 2 in Los Angeles on the 30th of March with a bit of a cough. It took a couple of weeks to gestate into something really impressive, with phlegm enough for an army, all day long. By then I was in Atlantic City, playing alto in the Ratpack show at Harrah's for a three-week run.

It took me until the middle of May to get to my doctor back in Austin. He chose Cipro, the Republican drug of choice when the Anthrax scare was happening, wrote up a 10-day course for me, and off I went to the H-E-B pharmacy.

As anyone who watches House on the TV knows, there are a great many things that can stand in the way of a true diagnosis. In my case, I had a bacterial infection that was masking a far more serious problem: Congestive Heart Failure caused by (we think) a viral infection of the heart muscle.