Irreversible ablation treatments

Ann's pulse has ricocheted from heights of 186 bpm (beats per minute) to depths of 46 bmp, sometimes over periods as short as an hour, since she went into atrial fibrillation (AF) twelve months ago, leaving her exhausted and she often needs extra sleep through the morning or afternoon. Electro cardioversion is a crude method of attempting reversal of AF, basically by sending a massive electric shock through her chest under sedation to stop the heart, and hope it restarts in a more natural rhythm. A previous attempt to reverse it failed, so Ann was started on even stronger drugs which didn't help much but brought their own unpleasant side-effects. Yesterday she had another blast of high voltage therapy, but this time it seems to have succeeded; the heart is mostly in sinus rhythm (SR), though still with bouts of AF. Because of the junior doctors' strike, Ann was the only patient brought onto the ward that morning, so she was attended by the great man himself (no, not God this time). The receptionist looked up from her empty desk to greet Ann, "back again?" and three different nurses kept coming in to see if she was comfortable or wanted another cup of tea. It is too early to tell if she will be less exhausted, but this morning she is back in bed with the heart moving between SR and bouts of AF, which confuses her Apple watch monitor that reports it as "inconclusive".  The next step will be ablation therapy, which means the deliberate obliteration of the natural pacemaker in the heart wall. 

Hundon football team play on a steeply sloping field opposite our house, which means that for half of the match, each team has to run uphill towards the opponents' goal. A few years ago, they moved up a peg from the lowest village league to enter the Cambridgeshire village league. I watched as they swung the ground round by ninety degrees to play across the slope rather than up and down it. They also had to install fancy new goal posts with proper nets. I watched as the groundsman explained they had to break up their old goal posts (a simple cross piece on two uprights) to comply with FA regulations requiring their complete destruction. This change means that hard hit balls go into the hedging at either end, and Byron can be relied on to fish one out on his regular walks round the field to run off with great glee holding the invariably punctured trophy high before him. He then gets his exercise by dropping the soggy bag at my feet to be kicked a few yards away for him to chase.

Ablation therapy for Hundon football club

Alas, Covid seems to have destroyed the team, which never reformed as players moved on and were unable to bring younger people on board. The clubhouse became dilapidated, and now is being smashed down. Walking past the destruction I am reminded of how we, full of hope, play across the field of life only to end in lethargy, despair, and final destruction. There is an air of terminal sadness as I walk on. They talk of building houses on the field; this would double our limited village housing stock but its future seems uncertain.  The town of Haverhill continues to expand and has crept up the hill to flood the fields beyond on its way to coalesce with Keddington, an expanding village between us and Haverhill. They have laid in massive water and sewage works outside Keddington ready to service its gross enlargement with nothing to stem this expanding concrete wall and the constant ablation of our life-sustaining arable and green country.

For a moment as we stepped from the car into the underground carpark in Bury for my eye test, I thought my eyes had gone completely. It was total darkness - all the lighting had failed and not a carlight or even emergency light was switched on. The automatic car headlights had guided us in, but now we had to switch on our phone torches and grope our way to the exit door. The ticket machine was still working though, and took our money willingly while lit by the torches. Then Edwin phoned to say that one third of the whole of Brazil was under a major power cut - it was just a strange coincidence for the rest of Bury was OK though, Brazil was set off by outage of one power station in an overloaded system; the car park was just one switch had been triggered. Strange, though, that there is no emergency lighting.