Been away a'spell

Yep, it looked like The Abandoned Mind had truly been abandoned for good. Folks came a'visitin' but ole Fr. Michael was nowhere to be found. No signs of activity and no new posts in months! Did the "mind" play out and force him to find better diggin's elsewhere? Or did a cave-in way down in the earth below leave him trapped and forced to try to dig his way out with nuthin' more than his rusty old pocketknife and a broken Dairy Queen plastic spoon?

Nah, that couldn't happen. Fr. Michael would never carry a rusty pocketknife!

Nope, instead I've just been laid low a bit by a gimpy ticker. The medical term is atrial flutter. It seems the top half of my heart can't figure out how to beat in rhythm with the bottom half, and thus it just sits up there and does its own wacky thing like a hopped-up beatnik on a new set of bongos. The docs say its an electrical current problem. I had it about 6 years ago, and at that time they fixed it by making me lick my finger and stick it in a lampsocket while they giggled and secretly flipped the switch. They yelled "Clear," I yelled "OwWhatTheF***!!" and just like that, my heartbeat was back to normal.

OK, I'm kidding about the lampsocket. They used a device called a defibrillator. It obviously didn't work since I still tell the occasional fib.

Anyway, since the flutter returned after only a few years, they now tell me that the zappo-treatment probably isn't the best option at this time. It might covert the rhythm to normal again, but only temporarily. I need a more permanent fix. Too bad; I really liked what the zappo thing did for my hair. Here's a photo from back then...

Oh man, was I cool! But it's all gonna be different this time. They have decided to do a procedure called a cardiac ablation in which, as I understand it, they begin by shaving parts of you that have likely never been shaved before unless you are an exotic dancer, in order to insert catheters into places you really didn't know it was possible to do, which they then snake up all the way into your heart to zap it and burn it from the inside to destroy the nodes that are causing the bogus electrical signals in the heart muscle. This is supposed to make the top half of my heart wake up and remember its job and beat in sync with the lower half once again. If it works, that will be way cool. All except for the shaving and catheters part. The part in which I go home well is the cool part.

I will be undergoing that procedure at the end of this month (November) so if you would like to keep me in your prayers, I would very much appreciate it. The doctors say it's an easy procedure (yeah, for them) with a high success rate. I'm actually looking forward to it at this point. I must be crazy.

If all goes well, I should be cleared to return to The Abandoned Mind in a few weeks to resume my work there. I'll keep you posted. Thanks for checking in.