A brief detour

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Posted by Ken Willis on August 28, 2002 at 01:17:23:

The last time I posted I was scuba diving about 2.5 months post-maze. I did just fine during the dives, but, coincidentally or not, my recovery took a detour. I started getting many more PACs and repeated runs of afib (confirmed by my atrial pacemaker, which is not pacing my heart now but has an event-recording function) interspersed with NSR. That pattern lasted about 10 days, then started getting better. From Aug. 19th-23rd I went on a challenging off-trail traverse of 9 high lakes in the Glacier Peak Wilderness of Washington's North Cascades with three friends and my wife's and my faithful dog, Lucas. We take an annual hike together, and for years we had speculated on the feasibility of linking a number of lakes in a single trip. I had been to all of the lakes previously on separate hikes, and had climbed the mountain lying between them, but we had 6 cliff bands and some unfamiliar country to get through to complete the traverse.

We all packed lighter than usual to help us handle the rugged terrain. The only technical gear we had was a short climbing rope, which it turns out we didn't use. One by one we found our way through the cliff bands and saw some truly beautiful country on the five-day hike, all but the last 4 miles off-trail. There was lots of elevation gain and loss and some very steep terrain to travel as well as some long days ( one eleven-hour day and another ten-hour day). I felt very good physically during the trip and was just as strong as the others. However, on three of the four nights I had PACs followed by afib followed by tachycardia (probably 120-130 bpm) totalling a couple of hours each of the three nights. The last day of the hike was the eleven-hour day, which included some snow travel, some serious knife-edged exposure (cliffs on either side of a two-foot wide ridge top) and gorgeous views in all directions. It was also the three-month anniversary of my maze surgery. That night I spent in my own bed at home without any interruption of NSR, and I haven't had any since.

I speculate that the diving must have stretched or tweaked some incompletely healed incision and caused the strange pattern of arrhythmia prior to the hike. The take-home message from this: don't go scuba diving so soon after maze surgery! I'm hoping that the improvement I've experienced since then will continue and lead to another Dr. McCarthy success story.

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