8.10.25
The past few mornings there has been a definite tang in the air. That certain smell and feeling such as one gets on an early morning in autumn. A couple of days ago I mentioned to Darrell that it felt like autumn had arrived and he agreed but also added summer wasn’t over yet! As if to remind us of that, Mother Nature has decided to throw a few more scorchers our way. Today is predicted to be 98 degrees with tomorrow and Tuesday reaching the 102 degree mark. Yet despite that, as I went to get the irrigation water flowing on the vegetable garden, lawns and in the cow paddock, there is a crispness in the air that made me glad I had my wooly jumper on.
After getting up at my usual time yesterday morning, I pottered about making my first cup of tea of the day, then in anticipation of milking, walked across the cow paddock to shut the gate, closing the girls in their dry lot. You see, in the evening, I separate the calves from Heidi and Lass so come morning I can head to the milk house where I turn Lass’s calf out to nurse and make Heidi’s calf wait for breakfast until I have relived his mum of most of her morning milk. The girls, including our new cow Lady Onyx – shortened to “Lady” – spend the evening out the back, grazing on over 90 acres of land. Each morning, I find them bedded down in their dry paddock where they returned to sleep next to the calf pen. It is a great system that makes for very happy cows! However, no milking was accomplished yesterday, instead I turned the calves out with their mums so as to forego my milking chore.
On Wednesday it will be a fortnight since the attempted ablation procedure was done on my heart. I say attempted because right off the bat I knew my particular arrythmia was not going to be an easy fix. My cardiac electrophysiologist doctor had warned me of that. We all had high hopes however that the wayward spot that was causing all the problems would be found, zapped and put to rest so my heart’s main pacemaker, the Captain of the Ship, could get back to work keeping the rest of the crew in line. Unfortunately, despite almost three and a half hours of zapping and probing, poking and prodding my heart to try to get the aberrant node to reveal itself, my cardiologist was unable to locate the cheeky blighter. I felt so discouraged when Dr. Laughlin came to give me the news the procedure had not been successful.
Hopefully when I chat with him this coming week, he will have a plan laid out for what is in store. The next step may be the zapping of my atrioventricular node – the AV node or what I call the First Mate – and the implanting of a pacemaker. Dr. Laughlin said they normally would not consider this for a 64 year old very healthy person with a heart that is otherwise in excellent condition, they usually do this for people who are older, in poor health with cardiac failure. I of course, do not fit that bill at all.
Chores are taking a tad longer to complete of late. Part of me wonders if all the fiddling about with my ticker hasn’t made things a wee bit worse. I know the heart must heal after going through the things it does when artificially put through its paces, I know it can take a few weeks to settle down, it is just so hard to be patient! With this feeling of autumn in the air it tends to put one into overdrive, thinking of all that must be accomplished before the seasons truly change. Yet things will get done bit by bit, day by day, little by little. As the saying goes, “Que sera, sera”.
