Angie & Jim

A Trip in the Emergency Roomby Jim

Well, using her pacemaker to get her out of arrhythmia didn’t work, so they’re going to do the cardioversion tomorrow. We saw both Dr. Dubin and Dr. Lui and they are concerned about the recent developments. Angie’s heart function has decreased even more since her visit last week, which worries them. They didn’t have a bed available on the cardiovascular floor, but they wanted to observe her for the night, so they asked that we head to the emergency room and “check-in” that way. They have a brand new emergency room in the new building and I guess we came at just the right time because there was practically no wait. Fastest emergency room admission ever.

The plan now is that they will observe her tonight and do the cardioversion tomorrow. There is concern that the amiodarone (her new supposedly more powerful anti-arrhythmia drug) isn’t enough to keep her out of arrhythmia after they cardiovert her. The problem is they have no way to know. She’s gotten stuck in bad rhythms like this before on other medications and had to cardiovert out, so the amiodarone may still be good enough, but the initial signs don’t look promising. If she goes back into arrhythmia after the cardioversion, they’ll need to transition her back to her previous medicine (dofetilide), which means she’ll have to wait for a few days for the amiodarone to clear out of her system before putting her back on dofetilide. Once the dofetilide is in her system (it takes a few days: it has a longer half-life than amiodarone), they’ll do another cardioversion to get her out of arrhythmia and keep her out. So that’s our plan for the week.