The fun things in August were Kevin’s birthday celebration, including an awesome kayak down Long Bay, plus a festive birthday dinner. And then the fair with Bev was also enjoyable.
But after the birthday and before the fair, on August 8th, I had to take Lester to the Emergency Vet. You may recall that I’d taken poor Lemon Drop there on the third of July; she had been acting strangely and peeing blood and of course I couldn’t get her in to our vet or anywhere else so we had to go to emergency and it was one of the many sweltering days we’ve had this summer and their air conditioning was broken and I sat there for a few hours trying to keep my face from melting.
Lemon Drop is doing great now, but at the beginning of August there were blood in another litter box and I quickly figured it out that it was Lester, and c’mon already with the ailing cats.
Poor fella. The only good thing about the second emergency vet trip is that their air conditioning had been fixed. And also they couldn’t find anything gravely wrong with Lester, except he has bladder crystals. They gave him an antibiotic and he now has to be on a Urinary diet.
So, all our cats with names beginning with “L” have to be on this regime – – Lester, Lemon Drop, and Lovey. Although I don’t know that much about Lovey’s eating habits because I’m sure she’s never going to warm up to me and Kevin is her sole protector and handler.
Because she’s always ravenous, Lemon Drop is OK with eating the special diet, and Lovey is, too. But poor Les – at first he wouldn’t eat any of the several choices of wet food he was offered, but now he does eat the same food that the other two “L” cats eat. But he’s lost more weight and I think it’s because he doesn’t get to eat all the delicious forms of wet chicken cat food that he was used to. But at least he’s hanging in there. He continues to purr and likes to sleep on my chest for part of the night.
Because I usually don’t remember anything, I was looking up something on this site and there was an entry from January 2024 where I wrote that Let was diagnosed with the early stage of kidney disease…and he had to be on a special diet!! But he refused all the special food. So what about that??? Oh well. He’s doing OK right now.
Here’s something you don’t see every day – on August 18th I was almost home and saw this trio of wild turkeys walking across the grass. Don’t see that every day for sure.
The next evening, August 19th, I spent some quality time with Spot out in the garage. This was the night before my Atrial Ablation.
My Afib had been steadily getting worse for a while. In the first year I only had it a couple of times that I know of , but then it increased, but usually I could pinpoint a trigger. I only had it a couple times in 2025, but this year it happened a few times for no reason at all.
I had a CT scan in May and my regular Cariologist said the reslts showed that my heart was healthy, except my right atrium was “slightly enlarged.” My Electrophysiologist had never tried to talk me into getting an Ablation, he just said that the Afib would inevitably get worse, but when I saw my Cardiologist and asked him to convince me that I needed the procedure he told me about the slightly enlarged Atrium. Whoa, that was all I needed. The ablation wouldn’t make my atrium decrease in largeness, but it would stop it from getting bigger.
In August I had to have a bunch of pre-surgery stuff including another CT scan, making sure I didn’t have a blood clot, and when my surgery was over I read all the notes from that CT scan, and was a little bit horrified to read that both Atria were moderately enlarged. I’d had two more episodes since the CT in May, and had that increased these two chambers of my heart?
My Electrophysiologist didn’t mention anything about that, but then his office happened to call me this afternoon to mention that the radiologist had seen a “sub 4 mm lung nodule,” and I told her that had been there since 2022 and she agreed that there was nothing to worry about, but then I grilled her about the enlarged parts of my heart and she said I didn’t have to worry about that either.
Meanwhile…Riley was curled up against Kevin when I finally went to bed before the surgery. Such a good kitty!
My surgery was scheduled for two p.m. on the 20th because I said I didn’t want to go at five a.m. I woke up at 7:30 because the phone was ringing which I thought was weird since it was on silent. I glanced down at it said it was the hospital. They were calling to say that they’d had a cancellation, and could I come in early? And I said, how early, and they said now. Oh boy.
At least I didn’t have time to worry about getting up early – I quickly showered and we were at the hospital by 8:30 and I was wheeled into the OR by 9:30. It was all so fast, and when they rolled me into the operating room I was struck by how bright it was in there – like an operating room! Many people were bustling about and they stuck big flat rectangular things onto me plus other sticky things and there were two giant monitors over the operating table. I had to scooch from my bed onto the table and I wonder how they lift people who can’t do that. A big gurney I imagine.
Last night my friend Amy who is a nurse said the flat things were defribrillators in case they had to shock me back to life. Gee, I’m glad I didn’t know that before now.
The anesthetist had told me that they weren’t going to stick something down my throat to put me out, but rather a small thing over my nose and mouth. And that’s exactly what happened, and that’s a great thing about an operation, you have no idea about all the stuff they’re doing to you. I do know that Dr. Ahmad snaked a catheter up my groin into my heart, and used electricity to block the errant electric pulses in my heart. I want to know, who thought all that up? It used to be that they either froze or burned the places in your heart and the Pulsed Field Ablation is relatively new, as well as easier to do and more specific. So that’s good.
They didn’t mention anything about painkillers after it was over and I didn’t ask, but they said I’d be really tired and that’s for sure. I had to lie there in the recovery room for almost three hours, and that was the most torturous part of the whole thing because once I was conscious I really had to pee but couldn’t get up. Thank goodness they let me go early, and I was home by four in the afternoon.
I napped, and then went to bed 7:00 and slept til 7:30 the next morning. I got up and felt OK, just very tired, and when I sat out on the deck I saw that I had these “Xs” on my feet. Hmm, what was that about? I texted Amy who looked it up, and I guess I was too groggy to do that myself, and she said it was so they could see the pulse. I’m sure to make sure there was still a pulse, so they wouldn’t have to use the flat defibrillators. Whew.
I was instructed not to exercise or lift more than ten pounds for a week, and I sure didn’t do any of that. I napped a whole lot. One day I walked around the lane with Mom and kept telling her to slow down because I couldn’t keep up. Another day we walked down to the water and went out on the boat which was fine, but I felt like I almost couldn’t make it back up the hill and was super tired afterwards.
But now I feel great. I’ve been running a few times, weight-lifting, doing regular stuff. I can pick up our heaviest cats!
It’ll take three months at least for the scar tissue in my heart to settle down, and I don’t have a follow-up til the end of November. Hopefully I’ll be cured of the Afib, otherwise they’ll have to do another ablation. I mean it wasn’t horrible, but I’d prefer to not have any more operations. At least not for a while…
Ok then,
Mrs. Cautiously Optimistic Hughes Who Used to Never Have Any Operations Whatsoever.