So here we go, with an IV pole between by legs, a porter pushing and Jenn packing all my personal belongings, we headed up to the ward. This is the place I would be staying until my discharge, so you could say it was step on to discharge.

The Cardiac Ward is pretty large with various sized rooms, I hit it lucky and ended up in a semi private room with an older lady called, Pat, I have changed her name to protect her privacy. Pat was quite chatty and was looking forward, at that point, to the company as I knew Jenn has a fair amount of work to catch up on and would not be around all the time.

So Saturday March 3rd I went for my first walk after the surgery on February 28th, and it did not got well!

When you are on the ward you wear a mobile telemetry box which monitors your heart rate etc. being mobile it means they can monitor you when you are walking around, which is something they want you to do. So I asked Jenn to help me up and with my walker we set off got a short walk, just to get a feel for my new gadget.

As we passed the monitoring station my room we can see on the monitor that my heart rate was very high, around 150, my nurse, you are still assigned a nurse but she also has a number of other patients, anyhow she took me back to my room and got my to way down so she could take by blood pressure, which was very very high, so high I was seeing star Burts in my eye. They gave me some meds and told me no leaving my room for the rest of the day.

I was little upset by this as it was another setback, remember I still had the whole Afib going on as I was waiting to get another Carioversion, but Jenn calmed me down and we settled in for the rest of the day having a good chat with Pat, who was for sure in a worse way than me!

That night was my first night of sleep since the past Tuesday, and felt so good, Jenn showed up early as was told it was very unusual for visitors to arrive so early, I did not care, I wanted her around me as much I could.

I had not been allowed any food or drink after midnight as I was going for this Cardioversion at some point, we thought it would be in the morning again at last time, but 10am came and went, noon and lunches came and went, 2pm came and went and and around 3pm I was fit to be tied and said to Jenn I cannot do this, I need food as it was no close to 24 hours since I had had anything to eat or drink, aside from a little water for my pills in the morning. Then a little after 3pm I was told I was going down to get this done, as mentioned they do it in ICU, make sense they are going to shock your heart.

This time it felt like a whole procedure unlike the previous day where it felt like it was an ad-hoc thing, I am sure it was not, but that is how I felt, I the day before I had felt the whole thing, this just felt different.

The first scare was that they looked at the time I had gone into A-fib and they had to do some checking as it was more than 48 hours after I had done into this A-fib thing and it looked like I mat need a echocardiogram before they would do it, delaying it again, once again my rock calmed me down, but they came back and said nope we are good to go, the procedure was going to be performed by Brad and the rest of the nursing team, I really felt much more relaxed this time.

As the first Carioversion did not go well for me being awake they decided a bit of a stronger drug was needed to knock me out, so Ketamine it was, and boy did it work. As I came out I had a whole space themed trip with combo of Star Trek, Star Wars as well as, oddly, Star Wars Lego, I was floating around what seemed like lego ships and I was moving between them, they where mostly white, and sometimes behind them I could see a brick building that was white with white windows.

Slowly I start to come out of this an could see multiples of the same faces, these where nurses and Jenn, slowly everyone started to come into focus and Jenn was there with me again, soothing me and calming me as she let me know that it world this time and my heart was beating as it should. I actually as of now do not remember getting back to the ward from ICU.

I can see how people could get addicted to these drugs, they are powerful and can take you to a place that could be better then you are physically in at that time. WOW.

Eat, oh man did I eat when I got back, I was so hungry, they are saved some of my lunch and added some extras.

So heart now beating as it should it was time to starting with this walking with the goal of getting out a soon as I could, I was done and all I wanted was by own bed along with a decent nights sleep, as much as I wanted this, I knew I was still in the best place I needed to be at this time.