Mere Dil ki Ghadi Karey Tick, Tick, Tick!
Most of us who grew up in the 70’s would remember this foot-tapping number by Lata and C.
Ramchandra from Albela with Bhagwan dada and Geeta Bali creating magic on the screen. Dil beating like a metronome is apparently the normal thing, but for a few years my dil was operating to a different beat or rather to no discernible regular beat. It would normally do a complex pattern like tick, tick,......, tick,....,tick, tick, tick,....,....,tick, etc skipping a beat here and couple of beats there. Of course if a PYT (Pretty Young Thing for those who are not in the know) were to be found somewhere on the horizon, the pattern would become even more irregular. You can imagine what my poor heart must have gone through with all the Madhubalas, Sharmilas and Zeenats, the on-screen ones and their look-alikes in real life, combining their wiles to assault my bechara dil. Such irregular behaviour, I learnt much later, is known as arrhythmia of heart. Apparently it strikes around 1 person in 1000. I was not particularly happy at being that one in thousand but I guess that is how nature rolls its dice.
I don’t really know whether I was born with this anomaly or this developed at a later stage and if it did the reason for such malfunction. It was discovered during start of a routine stress test about 16 years ago, however it was noticed that these abnormal (ectopic) beats disappeared at a higher level of workout and the pattern became regular. The doctors even got an angiography done to check that these abnormal beats were not a result of any blockages in the coronary arteries. Luckily the angio was clear with no discernible blockages. The general consensus was to leave the arrhythmia alone and watch if it changes over the years. The doctors initially diagnosed it being due to what is known as Left Branch Bundle Block (LBBB) in which there is a small phase difference between the electric signals passing across the left and right sides of the heart which leads to such arrhythmia.
So we watched it to see if the arrhythmia got any worse and worsen it did over the years. A couple of years ago I got a Holter Monitoring test done which is a sort of day-long ECG where one needs to wear a portable instrument on the body (in a pouch attached to a belt) while you carry on doing all the daily functions. Outcome of this test is much more representative of the heart functioning than an ECG, which as you would know provides only a small snap shot. This Holter test showed up that about 42% of my heart-beats were abnormal. This was still considered to be within acceptable limits.
In last quarter of 2014, however, the things seemed to be getting worse and I was getting a distinct
feeling of shortness of breath and extreme tiredness. This time the doctors were very clear that
something needs to be done. The pumping capacity of my heart had got affected and was hovering
around 45% as against the normal range of 55% – 70%. Over last 10-15 years, the medical science has developed more understanding of the phenomenon of arrhythmia and most importantly technology to treat that. It has now been established that in cases such as mine, the abnormal heart beats are generated by some spots on the heart wall (either inside wall or the outside wall). The doctors can now map the heart walls by inserting a catheter into the heart (just like in an angiography) and locate the points which are generating these abnormal beats and then proceed to zap them with radio-frequency waves. This technique is called Radio-Frequency Ablation and in developed countries it has now become a “routine” procedure like angiography and angioplasty.
I was in very safe hands with Dr Yash Lokhandwala , the best arrhythmia specialist in the city (or maybe country) to attend to the procedure and Dr Milind Gadkari as Cardiologist (from Pune and also my brother-in-law) to advise. The procedure was carried out in Holy Family Hospital in Bandra which has a state-of-the-art hybrid cathlab. Having gone thru an angiography once, I was fairly prepared for the procedure which is quite painless except for puncturing of the femoral artery and related trauma but RFA was something else which I had not factored in. As it happened Dr Yash discovered some 6 points in the heart which were singing their own tunes, more like a bunch of rowdy boys in a class bent upon creating chaos. They were silenced one after the other but one among them (must have been the gang leader) especially was refusing to keep quiet and I think Dr Yash almost gave up as he felt that I was getting more zapped than those truant points which he was directing all those RF waves at (which incidentally I was). So he called it a day and told us that not all but definitely a majority of problems would have got taken care of.
Of course all that RF energy pumped in had a few foreseen and a few unforeseen consequences. It took me a couple of weeks to be able to confidently venture out without feeling twinges due to some residual activity deep inside the heart. This was the foreseen part. The unforeseen effects were more spectacular. My heart was operating like a RF transmitter during this period. ISRO had to cancel their launch of PSLV satellite due to some unexplained radio frequency disturbance, NASA reported that the International Space Station (ISS) had to undertake emergency altitude correction due to one of the Russian satellites changing its course arbitrarily and heading directly towards it but the best part is one of alien space ships which was in the vicinity received this RF signal and (wrongly) concluded that earth had intelligent life on it and decided to return to their home planet Gliese 667 Cc.
In the 4 weeks after the procedure, I got a Thallium stress test done to check the heart functioning and another Holter test to check how effective the RF procedure had been. All of us including the
cardiologists were pleasantly surprised that arrhythmic beats had vanished almost entirely; irregular beats percentage had come down to less than 0.01%. Absolutely amazing. The Thallium test however indicated that the heart functioning may remain below normal and I will need to take care to ensure that the things remain at that level through a combination of diet, exercise and medication.
So now when I hear the Albela song, I know what it means to have a heart that is keeping time. It may not be as accurate as the Cesium -133 clocks that scientists swear by, but I guess this ticker of mine will keep ticking for the remaining couple of hundred years of my life.
25th April 2015
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