That made me smile in a resigned sort of way. I knew that once again, I would readjust my paradigms, and adopt his attitude as my attitude. After this first defibrillation, he put her on 50 milligrams of a beta-blocking medication called atenolol and after the second defibrillation, he upped the dosage to 100 milligrams. Since then, she has had no further incidents of ventricular fibrillation. This is Tom’s and my reality, and this is what we live with every day. How do we do it? I’ll give you the simple key which is in a verse that someone quoted to me: A BAG OF TOOLS By R.L. Sharpe Isn’t it strange That princes and kings, And clowns that caper In sawdust rings, And common people Like you and me Are builders for eternity? Each is given a bag of tools, A shapeless mass, A set of rules; And each must make- Ere life is flownA stumbling block Or a steppingstone. I guess that it is obvious that Tom, Guerin, Kara and I fashioned a steppingstone.
Getting Dizzy Part II by Walter Allan, M.D. When Maryann and Kara visited Joel Cutler’s office in March, the stored event retrieved from Kara’s ICD showed the dizzy spell in February had been another episode of ventricular fibrillation. It also showed that the ICD delivered a shock that converted Kara’s heartbeat back to normal. How and why Kara’s heartbeat went from its usual regular pace to this pattern is not known. The theory is that somehow the next heart- beat comes too soon for the heart muscle to conduct normally. Maybe this happened in February because of all the excitement Kara experienced being with her swim team for the first time since her cardiac arrest. In any event, it is felt that this early beat arrives in a portion of the heart muscle that is still in what is called the “vulnerable period.” This is the period of time when the muscle cells are becoming repolarized. The cells are recharging their membranes in order to generate an- other regular contraction. This is the portion of a heartbeat that represents most of the time measured by the QT interval. Even though Kara does not consistently have a measurably prolonged QT interval, she has shown