Right. Before anyone stages an intervention or starts a WhatsApp group with a candle emoji in the title, let me be clear: I am not dead. I am not retired. I have not, as one kind soul suggested, “finally seen sense and taken up golf.” I have simply been away, dealing with the sort of inconvenience that arrives without an appointment and refuses to leave without one.
Two of them, in fact.
For those who enjoy specifics, I’ve had two ablation procedures for atrial fibrillation. AFib, to its friends. This is the condition where your heart, an organ that has performed reliably for decades, suddenly decides it would rather improvise. Like a metronome that’s had a glass of wine…or vodka Red Bull. Perfectly fine most of the time, then briefly convinced it’s a jazz drummer.
Before the ablations, of course, came the cardioversions. This is the one where they attempt to reset the rhythm with electric paddles — a controlled shock, delivered by professionals, to persuade the heart to behave. In theory, one polite jolt and order is restored. In my case they tried three times. Three. Each one a bit more emphatic than the last, and each one failing to make the slightest impression on my heart, which lay there magnificently unbothered.
I have not felt anything like it since school, being marched to the headmaster’s study to be beaten for a crime I still maintain I did not commit. The same institutional calm. The same sense of a grown adult applying voltage to teach me a lesson. The only difference is that this time I was paying for the privilege, and at no point did anyone tell me it would “sting a bit and build character.”
When the shocks declined to work, the cardiologists moved on to ablation — the properly clever bit, where they go in and quietly reason with the misbehaving tissue until it agrees to keep time again. This, mercifully, worked.
I’d love to tell you I sailed through all of it with the stoicism of a man who once did a 2k in a headwind and called it “character-building.” I did not. There is a special humility in being wheeled about by people twenty years your junior, none of whom are remotely impressed by your erg scores. I mentioned my split times to precisely nobody, because nobody asked. In that building I was not an athlete. I was a Tuesday.
But here’s the flat, boring, reassuring part, stated plainly because you deserve it stated plainly: it all went well. The heart is behaving. I’m cleared, I’m back on the water, and the only lasting damage is to my ego, which was overinsured anyway.
What I did not do during all this was lie still and think about nothing. That’s not really available to me. So I read, I annoyed several people who understand the heart far better than I do, and I lined up some genuinely interesting guests for the podcast — people worth listening to, which makes a change from listening to me. More on them shortly.
So: I’m back. Thank you to everyone who checked in. And to the one person who asked whether he could have my Concept2 if things “went the other way” — I saw the message. I remember. And no.
Plenty more coming: the podcast conversations, and the training-smarter thinking I’ve come out of this with. Good to be back.