I’m on medical leave due to an episode of arrhythmia I endured last Friday. Here are the two entries I wrote on the subject: first one, second one. After my first episode of atrial fibrillation, that happened back in June, I recovered in about three or four days. Today is my fifth, and I feel much more diminished than after the first episode: I have a throbbing headache, my neck hurts, the whole left side of my upper torso aches (I have intermittent chest pains since a certain injection gave me heart issues, but after the latest arrhythmia, it has spread to my back).

I stayed at home for four days to rest and recover. Yesterday I called our secretary at work to give her an update, and she pointed out that I was having trouble breathing. Because I hadn’t been talking before, I hadn’t noticed it, but yes, I kept having to stop mid-sentence to inhale enough air to continue.

My worry now is that I may have suffered a heart attack in addition to the arrhythmia, or that the arrhythmia may have been a result of the heart attack. I keep thinking back to that moment when I felt a pressure inflating in the left side of my chest, only to trigger an arrhythmia the moment the pressure lessened. I’m supposed to wait for my cardiologist to contact me (I didn’t like nor trust the guy, and I’m not confident that he may call me) to write down the details of this episode and figure out if he’ll need to prescribe me some chronic medication. Apparently a riskier treatment involves opening an artery in my thigh, travelling all the way up to my heart with some tube-like apparatus and burning the inner surface of my ventricle. I’d rather leave that as a last resort.

An hour an a half ago I went outside to take a walk and figure out if my body can take that (I don’t have a car, and merely getting to work involves walking up through the center of my city to the train station, then from the train station in Donostia to a bus station, then through the hospital complex until I reach my office). I took the opportunity to read more of Cormac McCarthy’s Stella Maris, the much lazier companion to his latest (probably last) novel The Passenger .

Anyway, I could hardly handle a thirty minutes long walk: my head throbbed harder, my lungs didn’t want to cooperate, the back pain spread to my right side, and my body in general felt heavier and sluggish. Not only I’m unlikely to return to work until next week (I don’t know if they’ll want to prolong my contract another week; that’s a different matter), but my body doesn’t seem willing to heal at the moment.

Thankfully, the only thing that truly matters to me besides distractions and passing joys, writing, has continued, despite much slower. If I end up in a wheelchair due to this bullshit, I’ll be fine as long as my brain and my fingers work. If I suffer a stroke during one of these episodes of atrial fibrillation, though, that would likely end up as a very different matter.

As a summary: I don’t have to go to work, which is great, but I’m fucked otherwise, which is bad.

In completely different news, who else has been looking forward to a new episode of Chainsaw Man every week? Apparently making paint versions of the opening has become a new internet activity. Here’s a meme-filled entry. Also, why not, here’s the clip of last week’s glorious massacre (warning: gory and possibly spoilers). EDIT: they deleted the video. Just watch the ninth episode.