I had an interesting chat this afternoon with the receptionist for a specialist here, who got on my case during a visit to the hospital a year or so ago which resulted in being kept there for a week on oxygen while recovering from pneumonia. I didn't go there for heart trouble, but I ended up in the cardiac ward because they had problems with available beds.
So while I'm already in the heart ward, a hotshot young assistant to Dr. Imre, the resident Cardiologist, decided to have me checked out with an ultrasound of the heart, and he put me on Holter Monitor for most of that week. Those are now able to transmit your signals by radio direct to equipment in the central station on the floor, and that also displays your traces on viewing screens at a couple of nursing stations in the hallways. So to see how I'm doing, all I had to do was go out into the hallway with my portable oxygen tank, and watch that viewer for a few minutes.
I discovered it's not unlike the charts we had to watch in the power stations where I worked before retirement. Moving around would cause a lot of meaningless hash on the chart, but standing still would allow it to settle down to a reasonably reliable trace with a regular pattern. I'm fairly familiar with mine, because I've seen it before several times. It usually goes for about four beats and then there's a blank for the next one, and it repeats all that again. As long as it keeps repeating, I don't have any problem....
But I'm digressing - After I got discharged, fortunately without that oxygen tank, this young doctor put me on some new medication, and one of those was Xarelto. And therein lies the problem. I should say "problems". The purpose of Xarelto is to act as a blood thinner to keep the blood thin enough that it can't form clots which can result from atrial fibrillation. Atrial fibrillation is something that you can have without knowing it, because it doesn't always display any detectable symptoms. You can have it but not know it, until suddenly, the fibrillating in the Atria causes a clot, and if that circulates to somewhere like your brain, the result can be a stroke. So the young doctor put me on Xarelto.
And then all hell broke loose, figuratively speaking. I got a bad case of pitting edema in the ankles and lower legs, which was explained as resulting from my aged check-valves in the circulatory system wearing out. Then, I got big puffy blood blisters the size of a thumbnail inside my cheeks and upper lip. I popped those with a razor knife, and it took three or four days to heal over. And then we discovered evidence of occult blood in both urine and poop samples, which might normally suggest colon cancer. I didn't have any of this until I started taking that damned Xarelto. So I promptly stopped taking it.
After I'd been off it about a month or so, I went back to my family doctor and told him what I'd been experiencing, and asked him if he would give me another requisition for another of those tests for the occult blood, because I suspected that was a side-effect of the Xarelto. I got the test again, and it came out negative - no sign of occult blood. So I was right - it was the Xarelto.
So today, when that specialist's girl called to make another appointment with him, I said, "I'm not at all sure I want to continue this." When she asked why, I told her about this. She finally convinced me that I ought to talk to him directly and I should come in, because someone should be following up on my heart. I couldn't resist saying "My heart and I have been doing a hell of a lot better since I quit that medication. I'm not getting blood blisters inside my mouth, and I'm not getting swollen ankles or lower legs, so there's nothing wrong with my check-valves in the pipes, and I'm not getting occult blood in the urine or poop, so I don't have colon cancer. That was all because of the Xarelto, and you want me to come in and play nice with the guy that put me on that stuff?" She said, "Yes, I think you should." And I said, "Yes, my dear, you're probably right - I ought to tell him personally what I just told you, but perhaps not as nicely." She said, "Fine - How's April 24th at 10:00 a.m.?" I said, "Sounds good."
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