I had planned a coffee-fueled, 500-mile, 16-hour, three-state fishing dash: four hours to the river, eight on the water, then four home. A summer daytime trip I’d made several times.
A fitful night’s sleep had yielded to an odd morning fatigue, an annoyance to be ignored. Then my wife, a nurse practitioner and associate professor of nursing, saw something she didn’t like. Nurses can do that.
The conversation was brief.
“You feeling OK?”
“A little fatigued for some reason. But yeah, I feel OK.”
She left the room and reappeared with a stethoscope.
The examination was brief.
“We need to go to the emergency room.”
“The emergency room? I’m going fishing today.”
“No. We’re going to the emergency room. Your heart rate is about 160.”
I negotiated down to a stop at the doctor’s office, which I hoped would be little more than a walk-through.
Both the conversation and examination were brief.
“You need to go to the ER and let them run a couple of tests,” the attending physician announced about 30 seconds after employing her own stethoscope.
My wife and I took the elevator to the first floor, my irritation growing with the likely upcoming schedule change.
“I’m probably not going fishing today, am I?”
My wife flashed a look of combined amusement and concern. “No. Probably not.”
The river of destination was the Spring, which rises in northeastern Arkansas from a large freshwater spring and flows for about 60 miles to its confluence with the Black. It runs cool and clear, and the upper 10 or so miles are regularly stocked with trout, which nicely supplement the native smallmouth bass. It’s easily canoeable, but a couple of stretches are ideal for wade fishing, which was how I had intended to spend the day. As I was being escorted into an ER exam room, I was thinking about a particular stretch near the bank opposite the parking area where the trout prefer the shade from the overhanging trees and will often rise to a hopper pattern. If I left soon, I determined, I could still make the evening rise.
In 30 seconds, I was surrounded by five people, one of whom was pushing a needle the size of a No. 5 fly line into my left arm. Everyone seemed to be talking at once. Concern was in the air.
“Sir, how are you feeling?”
“I’d feel better if I were on the river. But I feel OK.”
A physician, grandfatherly in appearance but not in demeanor, appeared and applied his own stethoscope.
The conversation was brief.
“Any pain?”
“No.”
“Shortness of breath?”
“No.”
The room emptied, but the doc reappeared sooner than expected.
The conservation again was brief.
“I know what’s wrong with you.”
“I’m guessing this means I’m not going fishing.”
“Not today.”
The landscape changed to a garage-sized room in the cardiac care unit. A nurse appeared, oozing care and confidence.
After wiring me to a machine that looked as if it had come from the set from an early episode of Star Trek, she said, “This probably isn’t what you had planned for today, is it?”
“No, ma’am. I was going fishing.”
“Fishing! My husband likes to fish.”
The cardiologist arrived and seemed pleased that my heart rate was dancing around the 100 beats per minute mark and no longer spiking to 160. He sat on the bedside and explained that atrial flutter—an electrical problem, essentially—was the cause of my canceled fishing trip. He plowed through a list of possible negative side effects, the standouts of which were stroke and, ultimately, heart failure. But helpful meds were available and a procedure that, he said, had a “very high success rate of fixing this.” He had run some tests to see if I qualified.
“How high?”
“About 95 percent.”
He rose to leave.
“Do you have any more questions?”
“Do you like to fish?”
“I do,” he said. “But I don’t have time.”
I glanced at the wires snaking from my chest and the plans they had canceled.
“Find the time, doctor.”
A battery of tests followed, all of which seemed to involve needles, then a stroke of fortune. I was a candidate for a cardiac ablation, the 95 percent success rate procedure. A specialist who does the work would be at a regional hospital the next day.
The landscape again changed, ultimately to a small, cold room that the anesthesiologist described as the “procedure area.” The surgeon appeared and explained that the procedure zaps the tissue inside the heart that triggers faulty rhythms.
Zapping cells inside my heart didn’t sound encouraging, but it was too late to back out. I asked that he work quickly, as I needed to reschedule a fishing trip.
“I used to like to fish,” he said. “But I don’t have really have time anymore.”
“Find the time, doctor.”
Readers may contact Gary Garth at outdoors@kentuckymonthly.com