I feel I have sufficient information, and that if I’ve got questions if I’ve got questions I’d rather actually talk to someone about it, talk to the cardiologist about it than go trawling on the internet because I don’t find that very rewarding. A lot of the sort of patient sites, patient orientated sites tell me what I know already. It’s quite nice sometimes to read about other peoples experiences, but in terms of the sort of knowledge. And I haven’t got the patience to start looking up the kind of medical sources on the internet. I just don’t like using the internet very much. I’d rather be doing something else, so that’s part of the reason. I, you know, I’d rather be doing other things, [laughs] be outside, than sitting at a computer and yeah, if I’ve got questions, I’ll ask the cardiologists about it.

Ah, now that’s a really big one isn’t it? [Laughs] I think they need to know that they’re very, that they’re much more significant than most than most doctors and nurses realise. And that they’re very hugely varied and idiosyncratic and personal. And that they should be acknowledged, and it doesn’t actually need very much acknowledgement. You don’t need to kind of go into, unless someone is really, really struggling obviously, but for the average person who’s coping reasonably, it doesn’t take much. I mean, as I said, could be just a couple of questions like, How are how are you? How is the condition affecting you at the moment? Or, How is it affecting your life? And just a little acknowledgement that, you know, about how it might interfere [coughs] interfere or affect with each individual’s life, and an acknowledgement that that might be difficult. That’s all that it would take, and then you just feel more like understood I think and seen as a whole person. And that, yeah, and you’re not just a body sitting there or a machine that needs adjusting.

Take more notice of that, patients’ individual, subjective experience and, you know, fears, concerns, expectations, whatever and the fact that even though the ablation is a minor procedure, it’s actually quite traumatic, can be quite traumatic. Yeah and to and to, even though, you know, on these wards where they have a huge throughput, each person, for each person that’s a unique and very significant experience, and just to remember that, yeah.

I don’t think doctors have any sense of how you know, even something that could be seen as quite a minor procedure like that is like an attack on your body. I mean it’s mad if you think about it, you go and lie down on a table and you let these strange people stick things in your heart and, you know, freeze bits up and, you know, it is an assault on your body. And there was one point I remember the cardiologist saying to somebody, What’s the weight? Because they obviously wanted to know how much of some drug to give me and it was, it wasn’t, What’s her weight? It was, What’s the weight? And that just struck me as interesting, you know, what’s the weight of this body? [Laughs]. I felt like piping up, It’s me, and I’m fifty eight kilograms. [Laughs].

And with employers, I mean it’s the same with any other condition where you, you know, it can vary from day to day and week to week. It’s really tricky because it might, you might be perfectly fine one week and then not the next and that’s really hard for work, you know, workplaces to accommodate that. I don’t know what the answer to that one is, but just perhaps some awareness and some back-up would be good.

And I do sort of dread the thought of it kind of being a lifelong problem, and I know in one sense it is a lifelong problem but I do sort of think, What a drag. You know, if it’s, even if I’m sort of better now, which I hope I am, it’s going to recur sometime. But, on the other hand, theres a sort of, oh well’, you know, living life more day to day, week to week is not a bad thing. It’s quite a good thing in lots of ways. I am different from a lot of friends of the same age, who are healthy, completely healthy, and my husband I suppose, in that I don’t assume I’m going to live to be eighty something, ninety something in a healthy state. I don’t assume that, and that’s partly a kind of gut feeling, that I’m sort of thinking, Well, if I get to seventy five, I’ll be really glad. [Laughs]. And everything else is a bonus. So just any day feeling good is to be valued really. And that’s always a I guess a silver lining for any anybody who has an illness, that you start to appreciate days when you feel healthy much more. Yeah.

After the second ablation, which was apparently a difficult procedure, took four hours and I was sort of semi-sedated so that was fine. But I really felt kind of battered and physically kind of traumatised afterwards. I mean it’s not physically that traumatic but I did, and I don’t know whether it was partly, I don’t know, something happens to you on kind at a deep unconscious level, but I just felt like I’d been battered [laughs] somehow.

I was very sick afterwards and the, because of the sedatives, and the, I had a bit of a bleed from the where they’d put the catheter in. Presumably when I was being sick something kind of popped and that was, you know, mildly alarming and, but the nurse was so kind of, it’s very routine for them probably people bleeding a bit afterwards, so, and that was good in one way, but in another way, it was not so good because you thought, [aaagh] Just acknowledge that this is a little bit scary would you please? [Laughs].

So that might have added to my sense of having been a bit traumatised after that, after that second ablation, and I feel I just don’t want to go through that again. I mean that’s why I’m so pleased that it might be getting better.

I did find out, when I first had it and, as I mentioned, it happened when I’d been scuba diving and I did a little bit of reading around about then, and found out that it was common in, theres some particular group of women in some country in South East Asia, who free dive for scallops or fish or something, who get it [laughs]. So it seems to be something that might be associated with, you know, it happening in physically fit people who happen to dive, so women but no, I’ve no theories about why it’s happened to me.

But on the two days I was working, I was having to get up at half past six and drive twenty miles to the place where I was working and so that’s [laughs] that’s a bit of an effort in itself. But if I was having if I was having AF or I was having hangover effects from the flecainide, that was even more difficult, and I was having to sort of kind of pushing through a fog, if you like, to kind of get going for the for the start of the work. So I was aware of that, that it was, you know, a bit of a struggle and, whilst doing the actual work I was fine. It was it was a bit like, you know, in a social situation I seem to be able kind of click into a different mental place but it was the bits round the edges that were more difficult, the sort of writing records and the doing the admin stuff and things that I felt were starting to feel like a struggle. And so, you know, I suppose there were a goodly proportion of the times that I was working when I would be would be, have a flecainide hangover or have AF. So, I don’t know, maybe thirty to fifty per cent of the time or something and I was just beginning to wonder if I was, you know, giving my best and whether it was okay to be doing the doing the, you know, struggling on like this.