Previous weight: 361.6
Current weight: 356.4
Delta: -5.2 pounds

My personal assessment of the past week: Weight loss? Excellent. Otherwise? Awful.

The reason I lost so much weight was because I was in the hospital yet again. I went into arrhythmia and needed my medication adjusted.

About six months ago my cardiologist tried to get me off my main heart-regulating drug, amiodarone. Amiodarone works damn good, but it’s got terrible side effects over the long term. We tried three different medications (multaq, verapimil and most recently propafenone) and every time I’ve had some sort of episode. I had one at Stardock, which was terribly embarassing, and one here at Somanetics, which was also terribly embarrassing.

So at 6 AM Monday morning, my pacemaker shocked me while I was asleep. Go to the hospital. Find out my heart rate is running wild and I’m having arrhythmia all over the damn place. So they put me back on amiodarone. Unfortunately, they had to keep me in the hospital to load me up with the stuff and get my heart rate down.

I’m out of the hospital now and taking rather large doses of amiodarone to build it back up in my system. The good news is that my heart rate finally seems like its under control again. My cardiologist agrees that I should get some weight off before we try changing my medication again.

The bad news…anxiety. It’s not terrible but it’s worse than it was before this happened, naturally.

As I look back over this blog…I’m really not the same person I was before October 2008 and it’s all due to the anxiety. And for god’s sake, it seems like every time I get a little better, get back to myself, something happens and all I want to do is distract myself (usually with World of Warcraft). I don’t want to talk, I don’t want to work, I don’t want to work on my own projects. Such extroverted things, difficult enough for an introvert like me, become impossible when I’m anxious. I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to write this damn web post about it. I don’t want to do an episode of Let’s Play Starflight. I don’t want to work on Inaria. I don’t want to work on Planitia. I don’t want to set up my web store. What’s the point?

I might die soon.

Soon after everything that happened in October 2008, I voiced the opinion that I wished it were a year from then, because things would be back to normal.

It’s three years now, and they aren’t. I’ve done a lot of brave things…moving to Michigan knowing I was cutting ties with the cardiologist who best understood what I was going through was difficult. Weathering the layoff from Stardock and managing to get right back on my feet with another job. But I don’t feel brave. I feel crazy scared, all the time, unless I’m being distracted by a computer game.

I guess I should just come to grips with the fact that I’m never going to be the person I was again. I’m never going to be able to forget about the fact that hey, guess what? I’ve got a completely bum ticker and if it weren’t for modern medicine I’d be in the ground already.

Where do you go from there? Is there anywhere to go?

I don’t know. All I can do is keep plugging; my wife needs me, my kids need me.

But will I ever wake up happy ever again?

(Oh, and why the hell did my damn pacemaker have to go off while I was asleep? I haven’t slept well since, and frankly, sleeping is one of the few things I really like to do. I swear, it’s like some sort of Pavlovian thing. “Let’s shock him until he’s got nothing left to enjoy!”)