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| Icebergs are so exciting and unusual. This was massive, many stories high, |
Today’s post will not include photos other than the “one year ago” photo at the bottom of today’s post and a few other photos from the “one year ago” link. See here for that post.
In 2007, I had a cardiac ablation in the “cath lab” at Park Nicollet Hospital in Minnesota. I was diagnosed with an extra “electrical” valve in my heart that was causing an extremely high pulse. Once I had the procedure, I was told my heart was now perfectly normal with no plague or other issues.
However, after having a cardiac ablation, regardless of the reason, an EKG can show as abnormal when the heart and arteries are delicate. I’ve been hoping for this outcome, but the recent jaw pain and the few abnormal ultrasound scans yesterday have dampened my hope.
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| A Crabcatcher Seal was taking the plunge in Antarctica. |
After the ablation, I was back at the health club within a week, pounding it out and feeling quite OK. Since that period, there’s been no incident until this recent jaw pain was diagnosed as possible angina, lack of blood flow to my jaw, possibly due to one or more clogged arteries. So here we are today at Nelspruit Hospital Mediclinic, awaiting my fate.
Rather than drive the 90 minutes back to Marloth Park, by waiting for the results today, we’ll avoid a return trip if I need to have some invasive procedure or surgery, providing they can schedule it within the next 24 hours. Otherwise, we’ll drive back to Marloth Park to return sometime in the next several days.
At this point, our visas run out on February 15th, and we’ve planned to spend the night here in Nelspruit on February 14th in preparation for our early morning flight to Kenya the following morning. Oh, so much is up in the air!
Thus, most likely today, we’ll know what course we must take within the next few hours. If we weren’t leaving in 10 days, this would be less complicated. But, with our visa status, prepaid flight, and expensive prepaid photography tour in Kenya, none of which is refundable, it certainly is cause for concern, right along with the health issues.
In our usual way, we’ll forge ahead, attempting to stay as optimistic as possible while in each of our minds, we roll around the worst and best-case scenarios. It’s impossible not to do so and also impractical not to have a backup plan in place.
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| The champagne and flute carriers were loaded onto all of the 10 passenger Zodiac boats. |
At this point, we’ve only discussed the angioplasty possibility. This recovery is only a few days, along with a week or two of taking it easy. We could make it…the visa expiration date and the photography tour in Kenya, which doesn’t officially begin until one week after we arrive in Nairobi, giving me plenty of time to take it easy at the lovely hotel in Nairobi.
We don’t, at this point, want to project any more severe treatment than angioplasty. Why put ourselves into a further tither of worry and concern? Besides, all of this could be a moot point if the test results came out good enough for a “watch and see” and possible medication route, which may alleviate the issues discovered. Oh boy! I’d be jumping for joy at that possibility!
We’ll know soon enough. We’ll report back when we do. We both want to express our gratitude to all of our readers who’ve commented and written to us by email. Also, we know undoubtedly, that those who didn’t write are rooting for us as well. Thanks to all of you!
We’ll be back at you soon!
Footnote: As of the time of posting today’s story, it’s 1400 hours (2:00 pm), and we’re now back in Marloth Park. After waiting for almost two hours, we were told the report won’t be available until tomorrow morning after all, at which time we were scheduled to speak to the cardiologist at 9:00 am. Thus we decided to drive back to Marloth. Tomorrow’s post will include the decision we’ve made based on the collective test results.
Photo from one year ago today, February 5, 2018:
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| There we were, sitting on a Zodiac boat in Pleneau Bay, Antarctica, sipping on French champagne. Was that ever fun! For more photos, please click here. |