Gilmore Girls Possess Magic Healing Powers

Chez Juice has had a difficult couple of weeks. Last Tuesday, Shad went to the emergency room with his heart racing out of control. They hooked him up to a million monitors, tubes, machines, etc., and diagnosed it as atrial fibrillation. His heart was beating erratically and at twice the normal rate, and was not converting back to normal.

We had a similar situation three years ago, and that time it was even worse. His heart rate was even more erratic, and we spent hours and hours in the hospital pumping chemicals into his body in an attempt to convert the heart rate back to normal, but it wasn't working. After several hours of this, they ended up putting him to sleep and electrically restarting his heart. He stayed the night in the hospital, and there were tests the next day.

This time, we decided to skip the whole shoot-the-body-full-of-chemicals phase. Things were not going well after a visit from The Slasher, the woman responsible for putting in the IV. She stabbed him SEVEN TIMES trying to find a vein. He had marks all the way up and down his arms; a horrifying experience for anyone, but especially for my sweetie, who has a phobia of needles. So, I signed the consent form acknowledging that he might die during the procedure and then they put him to sleep and made me leave the room. The brought out Sparky and electrically charged his chest, which successfully converted his heart back. He was in much better shape after he awoke. We even used my mobile phone to record a short travel-documentary-style video in the emergency room. We took pictures, too; what seemed at the time to be agressively cool-looking pictures of Shad attached to a million different tubes and monitors . . . I haven't been able to bring myself to look at them, and I'm certainly not going to post them.

We took the rest of the week off to recover. There have been several doctor visits since--blood work, cardiologist, etc. They fit him with an event monitor that he will be wearing for the next month; it's an impressive contraption with lots of wires connected to his body to monitor his heart activity when he experiences certain symptoms.

So far the best prognosis is recurrent atrial fibrillation induced by stress. We are planning to get a second opinion, hopefully at Abbott, which is the place to go for heart problems, I'm told. The current situation is not at all pleasing; the beta blockers they gave him caused too much fatigue, and they haven't really given any solutions other than to just keep coming in for an electric restart when it happens again.

In the meantime, we're working on eliminating stress and eating well. I made a trip to the grocery store for cereal and succumbed to all of the heart-healthy marketing techniques. I filled the cart with Kashi Go Lean, Smart Start, etc. I couldn't throw that many boxes of Kashi into my cart without feeling a bit guilty and oppressed, so I went back and threw in a box of frosted mini wheats, too. I feel itchy about being in charge of his diet; seems like a natural gateway to monitoring his bowel movements or something, and I'm really hoping I don't have to do that ever, or at least for another fifty years.

As far as I can tell, the best recovery mechanism is watching every single episode of the Gilmore Girls ever. Shad blew through the first two seasons in the last week. BLEW through them. I personally did not watch one minute of the show, but I'm inclined to believe there is something magical about it because the last few days he has been looking and feeling better, and seems much happier.