Addendum for TraumaMoma911:
No, you aren’t being too curious, TM. The resulting damage to my heart was part of the stuff I cut out of the entry because it was getting so long. I’ll give you a brief run down of what’s wrong with me now, because of all this.
My official diagnosis was Idiopathic Viral Cardiomyopathy. “Idiopathic” means that it was a unique reaction; most people wouldn’t have reacted that way to whatever virus I caught. “Viral” is just a best guess on the part of the doctors. They never found any evidence of a bacterial infection, so they blamed an unknown virus. “Cardiomyopathy” is a ten-dollar word to say that my heart muscle was sick.
This condition usually results in Cardiohypertrophy – enlargement of the heart and it’s chambers. Picture the heart as a balloon, stretching out, and you have the general idea. The catch is that as the heart-balloon gets bigger, the valves that keep blood from back-flowing get pulled apart, and blood can leak backwards at certain phases of the heart’s cycle. This makes the heart inefficient and makes it work harder than it was intended too. Blood pressure goes up because blood backs up in the body.
I lucked out. I didn’t have any signs of cardiohypertrophy on my last exam. About a year after I was released from the hospital, I did develop a heart murmur though, which indicates that there was damage to my heart valves. We don’t know if this will get worse over time. I don’t smoke and drink in moderation, so that helps. I’ve put on too much weight over the past five years though, and since each pound of fat represents an extra mile of blood vessels my heart has to pump blood through, this is not good. I’m working on doing something about that now.
The biggest effect to my heart is that its conductivity was affected. While there is no sign of overt damage to the muscle, I occasionally have episodes of what are called Ventricular Premature Beats (VPB’s) because of this. My ventricals (the chambers of the heart that pump blood out of the heart) sometimes beat before the atria (the chambers of the heart that take blood in) get a chance to fill them. The heart ends up beating without really pumping any blood. This aren’t life threatening in my case, or even any particular problem at all. It’s just something we have to keep an eye on.
The real damage wasn’t to my heart, but to my veins, especially the veins in my legs. The antibodies I formed because of my reaction to heparin caused my body to attack the valves in my leg veins. These valves are there to help your heart – they keep the blood being pumped up towards the heart from slipping backwards during the time the heart rests between beats. My leg valves don’t work any more, and blood backs up there, causing fluid to squeeze out of my veins, into the tissues of my legs. This is called edema, and makes my legs look perpetually swollen and (in my humble opinion) quite ugly. I figure it’s a fair trade off, though.
The filter they put into my vena cava is permanent. Once in, it cannot be removed. Because it is a foreign object, it could ironically cause the very clots it was designed to catch. So I must be on a blood thinner for the rest of my life, to prevent these clots. Again, I figure it’s a fair trade off, although it means that I can’t do the kind of veterinary work I went to school for. I was kicked by a horse during my senior year of veterinary school, and because I was on the blood thinner I had a “compartment bleed” into my right quadricepts. I ended up losing a large hunk of muscle in my leg because of this. That convinced me that working with large animals without any guarantee of having other people in the area was a pretty bad idea, so I gave up the idea of dairy practice.
Some of the drugs they gave me in the hospital to control the congestive heart failure are known ototoxins, which means they can damage your hearing and/or your balance. When you’re busy dying, you don’t worry about that too much. It was discovered about three years ago that I have unexplained hearing loss in my left ear, in what’s called the “conversation range”. The pattern of loss is very peculiar, and my doctors are guessing that it has to do with the drugs I was given in the hospital. There’s no proof that this is the case, and frankly it really doesn’t matter. The damage seems to be gradually progressive, though I’ll know more after tomorrow morning, when I get my next hearing test. I’m rather dreading that.
Finally, the damage to my lungs seems to have exacerbated the asthma I’ve had on and off again since my early twenties. I also have problems catching my breath at higher altitudes, because not all of my lung tissue works properly. During normal activity this doesn’t bother me at all, though, and I’m actively working on a cardio-exercise program that is improving my stamina. I doubt I’ll ever be a jogger, but I’m starting to think that speed walking may not be out of my range.
All in all, it’s a pretty short list of complaints I have from this. I shared the Cardio Ward with people who had had this or other heart diseases and who had been waiting for months for a heart to be donated so that they’d have a new lease on live. There was one man they called the Mayer of Hearttown who had been there over a year waiting for his new heart. I had one roommate who was waiting for a heart-lung transplant. I had another roommate tell me of having to go up and down the stairs in her house on her butt, one stair at a time, because she wasn’t strong enough to climb them. There were many patients on Ventricular Assist machines – large boxes that they had tethered to them at all times, helping their hearts to pump blood. They had to push these shopping-cart type vehicles with their ventricular assist machines on them around with them if they wanted to leave their beds. As I exercised in the hallways the week before I was released from the hospital, I walked with these patients as they did their best to keep their bodies fit while they waited for a piece of luck that might never come their way.
I was pretty damned lucky, and I have nothing to gripe about. And thanks for the good wishes, all.