The Hospital Option

I got home from the hospital Thursday. Home never felt so good.

Backstory: I entered a local hospital on Tuesday with a-fib (atrial fibrillation). It wasn’t the first time I’ve been treated in the hospital for a-fib, but I think it may be the last time. Untreated a-fib can cause a clot to form in the heart, and the clot can travel to the brain and cause a stroke. Strokes are bad.

At the hospital, I had an echo-cardiogram AND a TEE (trans-esophageal echo-cardiogram) which involved running an ultrasound probe down my esophagus (gag) to look for clots in the heart's atrium, then an electric shock stopped my heart momentarily. When it restarted it was in normal sinus rhythm. That lasted five hours until I coughed and my heart went back into a-fib. That's not supposed to happen.

My cardio doc said I had 3 choices. Option One: radiofrequency ablation. In that procedure, a gadget is threaded up a vein in my leg to my heart, and the troublesome part of my heart is zapped away. It's a 3 to 5 hour procedure.

Option Two: begin taking the blood thinner warfarin. It's cheap but I would have to go to the doc's office once a week to have my blood monitored. It has lots of interactions with various foods, herbs, and other drugs. And it can make you bleed to death, or worse, cause a brain bleed which turns you into a vegetable. But not the leafy-green kind of vegetable that is good for you. No, it turns you into a bad vegetable, like okra.

Option Three: begin taking one of the newer blood thinners, like Xarelto or Eliquis. They have the great advantage of not being warfarin, but they cost an arm and a leg. Seriously, you have to give the store an arm and a leg before they will fill the prescription. You get to choose right or left.

To give myself time to think, I left the hospital with a prescription for Eliquis. I also wrangled a 30-day free trial offer from Bristol-Myers Squibb. All I had to do for the free trial was give them my name, address, email addy, and phone number, and agree to give up all my privacy rights and allow them to call me anytime day or night. How could anyone say “No” to a deal like that?

As a footnote, I will add that the hospital staff could not have been more friendly and solicitous. Even so, lying in a hospital bed with nothing more than a crappy television picture to look at all day, being stuck with needles, and carted hither and yon for various tests, was enough to make me want to cut my head off with a dull, plastic butter knife. When I mentioned that to one of the nurses, the plastic knives that had been coming on my food tray disappeared permanently. I can hear the staff now, muttering to each other, “Get rid of the plastic knives. He says he’ll cut his head off, and he’s crazy enough to do it.”