Peony time!

The beautiful peonies, my favorite summer flower, are starting to bloom, late, like everything else this wet and cold spring (there's been freeze advisories over the past few nights!). It definitely doesn't feel like we've turned the corner toward the end of May.

The peonies also welcomed me back home after my third heart ablation on Friday at the Ross Heart Hospital at OSU. I was released Saturday afternoon since everything was stable. This ablation, an "AFib" ablation, or pulmonary vein ablation, was more complicated than the two prior ones, requiring anesthesia and intubation rather than simple sedation.

While being completely "out" is good, especially since the prior two were quite painful, anesthesia brings its own complications and side effects so it's not a free ride. I had forgotten, for instance, how being awoken from being anesthesized feels like breaking the surface to gasp for air after having spent time in the darkest recesses of the deepest ocean. There's some discomfort and the doctors said they had "burned more than usual" (set off a California wildfire in my heart, no less) so that's to be expected. Mostly, I just feel like a truck ran over me but I'm extremely glad that there were no complications and that I'm back home and in recovery.

Now, we wait. Again. It's a two-week recovery, more or less, and then a month before I can drop one of the heart medications (the more potentially problematic one), and when I get a 30-day event monitor to follow up on my condition. This time we're considering an implanted monitor since I am, of course, violently allergic to the glue used to stick the monitor prongs to skin. I'm just glad there's an alternative. Then I see my specialist again in three months, if nothing happens from now until then that necessitates an earlier visit. Here's to hoping that's the case.

This situation has prevented me from finishing my grading so I'm still slowly plodding through the last of it so I can finally be done with this semester. I had two really good classes (both over-enrolled) and am immensely grateful that I was able to finish them successfully. Once I'm actually done with the grading, then I can look forward to a summer of rest and fun and writing. But not just yet.