Five filled in, nine left
Sunday August 07th 2016, 11:38 pm
Filed under: Crohn's flare,Family,Friends,Life,Lupus

IRhythm, it turns out, has nothing to do with music.

Me, Tuesday evening: So it’s really cool, see, the new ones, you don’t have to have a landline to phone in the results every night and there are no wires or anything! (Having done this twice before in 25 years.)

Richard: That means memory has improved and gotten cheaper.

Me: Not to mention the rest of the technology. (Wondering if this was my friend Alan’s startup, it being his kind of thing. Silicon Valley can be a small place.)

I said to the tech at the time, Tell me, how does it stay on for two weeks? I have to change my stoma barrier for my ileostomy every three days or it starts to give way. Granted, it’s got digestive enzymes coming at it all the time, but still, three days vs. two weeks? Doesn’t the skin shed it by that point?

It should hold, he answered. If an orange light comes on that means it’s not right against the skin and if that happens we need you to tape it on. Do you have anything that would hold it well…?

Uh yeah I’ve got some old stoma barrier stuff I can cut up no problem there.

They saw that pulmonic heart valve being officially “moderately” antsy on an EKG once years ago. The next time they EKG’d it it was fine. I’ve had a right-bundle-branch block, I’ve had it almost disappear while I was on an anti-tumor necrosis factor med. Lupus is ever the hit-and-run disease.

To back up a bit: I had a longstanding routine appointment Monday with the cardiologist and a cardiac cough episode that happened on cue the day before got his interest. “You haven’t had that for awhile, have you? You go sometimes six months without an episode.” (Meaning, you and I both know how hard it is to catch this in the act.)

Yeah, I do usually get a bit of it in the summertime though because there’s always a little more UV exposure no matter how careful I am.

Then he said all these soothing and comforting things about how it wouldn’t damage my heart.

And then he ordered the heart monitor, which was installed the next day after the insurance agreed. It came with a booklet to make notations in about when, much how, and how long and I was assured it was okay to write down more than what it had room for if I had too many incidents.

Oh goody.

Five days. No orange light yet.

But again, this is all same-old same-old and I’ve debated saying anything here at all. Till I realized that the next time I have to go on the latest and great in heart monitors I’ll want to look up when the previous time was. So you’re stuck with this. Sorry about that.


2 Comments so far
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Grateful for technology that helps us.

Comment by Sherry in Idaho 08.08.16 @ 8:50 am

Sounds like you both need good monitoring – I’m glad you are getting it!

Comment by twinsetellen 08.08.16 @ 6:24 pm



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