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I had the most pleasant hospital experience today. (That's not something you hear often!)

For the last 15 years of so I've had occasional bouts of atrial fibrillation (a not-particularly-dangerous arrhythmia, or “irregular heartbeat”), where my heart suddenly can't keep a steady rhythm. In older folks it's often accompanied by tachycardia (“super-fast heartbeat”) which is bad, but I've never had that problem, so my A-fib is not directly dangerous. However, if left untreated for more than a day or two, the irregular flow of blood through the heart could allow clots to form, which are directly dangerous, so when it starts (and no one knows what sets it off), I take an aspirin to thin the blood, and look to correcting it.

When I lived in The States, “correcting it” involved being put under with a general anesthesia, having electrodes attached to my chest with ridiculously-strong adhesive pads, then receiving two well manicured electrical shocks in quick succession, one to stop the heart and another to restart it, hopefully with a good rhythm.

The worst part of this experience was the removal of the electrode pads, because they would take a few layers of skin with them, so I got into the habit of asking that they be removed while I was still under.

Anyway, the first time this happened after moving to Japan, it was late on a weekend, so they did the shock thing in the ER, but later the cardiologist suggested I try the drug “Sunrythm” (サンリズム, pilsicainide hydrochloride) the next time it happened. “Rhythm” in the name, of course, comes from the regular heartbeat it tries to restore, with “Sun” coming from the company that developed it, “Suntory”, which tends to be more famous for its beer and whiskey production.

It worked well every time since, until today when it didn't correct the problem that started yesterday morning, so I went to the Kyoto Prefectural Teaching Hospital here in town, expecting the many-hours wait that always accompanies a visit to a clinic or hospital. I got there at 8:50am and was talking to a doctor by 10:00. Wow, that was fast (made faster by Bill Bryson's At Home on my iPad's Kindle app, courtesy of a gift from my mom).

An hour later I'd had an EKG done and was chatting with a cardiologist. He suggested that they should do the shock thing, since it had been more than a day since the arrhythmia had started. That was fine with me, but I suggested that we try the Sunrythm again, since it turns out that the stuff I'd been taking had long expired, so maybe a quick shot of the good stuff would do the trick.

So, half an hour later (11:30) I was on a bed, still reading my Kindle, with an IV drip of Sunrythm, being attended by an incredibly cute cardiologist whose attractiveness did nothing to help steady my heart. We waited a while to let the Sunrythm work, but it didn't, so at 1:04 she gave me an injection of 1% Propofol, a short-term general anesthesia to put me under.

At least it was supposed to.

She said that it would be painful around the arm where it went in, but it wasn't. Rather, I felt it first in my chest as an odd (but not unpleasant) sensation, then I noticed my vision start to blur. I was giving them (the cute cardiologist had been joined by another cardiologist and two nurses) a running commentary of the effects, but after the vision started to blur, the progression stopped and I remained in a somewhat-blurry-vision not-unpleasant limbo. After a short while I commented to the nurse that it had stopped progressing at blurry vision, and then a minute or so later I noticed that the heart monitor's beeping had become regular, so it seems that the Sunrythm did kick in, just in the nick of time. The whole shock thing wouldn't be needed.

I pointed out the steady rhythm to the nurse, who then commented “yeah, because we shocked you”.

Doh! I had one continuous three-minute memory of what turned out to be a 20-minute span.

I asked whether I'd said anything while I was under, and apparently I said “Ouch” once (probably when they were taking the shock pads off my chest). It turns out that I said it in Japanese, which both surprises and delights me.

Anyway, half an hour later I was waiting in line to pay the bill. With the socialist insurance over here, the bill was 19,140 yen, about US $240.

I had expected a long day of waiting and inaction, but things moved along quickly, the doc was cute, and oh yeah, I didn't die. All and all, a good experience.