Yesterday I went through a second episode of atrial fibrillation (arrhythmia) due to a physical issue with my heart. Here’s the post I wrote about it. I’m still drugged from flecainide; I feel like I weigh two times as much, my entire body is sluggish, I’m having trouble coordinating my fingers to type, and there’s a wall in my mind that plenty of thoughts can’t get through. I intended to start writing the current scene of my novel today, but I haven’t been able to even finish organizing the notes for it.

I think I’m going to take a medical leave from work. I’ve had coworkers take a leave for sillier things than a heart issue; one of them was absent for a month and a half because she injured a finger. The more I think about my experience from yesterday, the darker it seems to me. I recall that feeling of a bubble-like pressure building up in my chest, then getting relieved as if letting the air out, and immediatly suffering an arrhythmia. I went through a 200 heart rate. That sounds like there’s some clog in my arteries or something, but I already had an echocardiogram done. Apart from that, I still feel an echo of the fact that yesterday I was fine with the notion that I may not survive to see another day. The world doesn’t feel the same for a few days; I’m sort of a veteran of that kind of bullshit.

Today I went to bed after lunch without any plan of when I was going to wake up. I woke up at about half past four, then fell asleep again. Woke up at a quarter past six.

I’ve been looking up nostalgic Japanese songs from the 90s, only because the song “Sobakasu” by Judy & Mary, a group from the 90s, started playing in my brain for no apparent reason. I doubt I had thought about that song even once in the last fifteen years. Here’s the energetic, 90s song. Those were such brighter times. I feel so bad for people who have only experienced this world from the 2000s onwards.

I wondered what other Japanese music from back then I could get into, and I learned about the pop singer Izumi Sakai, a beauty whose voice must have sounded everywhere in the 90s (and I recognized it although I have no idea from where).

Like some other Japanese artists, she attempted to separate herself from her works, and didn’t even go on tour until the end of her career, in the early 2000s. A couple of years later she got diagnosed with uterine fibroids, ovarian cysts and endometriosis. She went through chemo holed up in some hospital for about eleven months. A month after she was told that her cancer had spread to her lungs, they found her dead from a fall involving an emergency staircase. Here’s a Japan Times article about it.

I’m going end this day by playing some Dwarf Fortress. Good game.