I will try to keep this short. My posts of late have been rather long-winded. Patrick was shocked today with an episode of v-tach. He collapsed in front of a customer at the shop, but managed to come out of it just before the darkness finished closing in. There was no trigger, no real reason for it to happen other than the current status of his heart and its inability to sustain a healthy rhythm. The image I attached to this post is of a device the cardiologists use to interrogate and adjust Patrick's ICD. They wave a magic wand over his ICD and suddenly he's connected via wireless connection to the device. It tells the cardiologists everything that has happened to Patrick's heart since the previous interrogation. With a few clicks and a few taps of a stylus they can speed up his pacing and make him feel like Superman, or they can turn the pacing down and make him feel like a dying old man. It's surreal, disturbing, and creepy. The power of technology is at the same time fascinating and frightening. At his last follow-up on Monday they were concerned about his level of anxiety regarding the possibility of enduring more shocks, and the frequency with which the defibrillator has still been issuing corrective shocks. To counteract both of these they decided to decrease certain thresholds at which the pacemaker shocks him, and at which the defibrillator issues the initial corrective shock. They did this by telling it to pace him after a smaller amount of missed beats, thereby increasing the efficacy of the pacemaker in being enough to prevent the defibrillator from going off. They also reduced the length of time the defibrillator waits during an episode of v-tach before it decides to shock him. Like I said, technology is fascinating and frightening. His ICD knows when to shock, how many joules to shock him with, when to wait, and when to shock multiple times. It's not just a device - it's a miraculous little robot keeping my Patrick alive. The objective of these corrections was achieved this morning - to keep Patrick awake and to prevent him from falling unconscious during an episode. As I said in a previous post, during his last big shock he stopped breathing after passing out. The last thing we want is for brain damage to occur due to lack of oxygen to the brain during a v-tach episode that knocks him out. Let's not compound the problem, y'all... He is fine now. He stayed at work, and later when I called him to see how he was doing he was laughing with his sister and brother-in-law about a joke I can't even type here. So his sense of humor is intact and has survived unscathed throughout all of this. It's too bad you guys can't see me rolling my eyes... Thank you for your continued prayers and positive thoughts. Even though I say it until I'm blue in the face, they really do mean so much to us ❤️
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