Community post

A Brief Absence

I see by checking my activities that the last time I commented or voted on Hive was two days ago. I don't use automatic voting, so there has been radio silence on my end for two days. Fortunately, I'm still here, but life has been complicated. It has been so complicated that I feel as though I've been away for two weeks.

Much has happened in the past few days.

On Thursday, August 20, my son and I rushed my husband to the emergency room. He was having a cardiac event that caused him to fall at home and collapse on his way into the ER. Things were touch and go for at least twenty-four hours. Scary. The ER doctors asked about resuscitation, a living will, and my role as healthcare proxy.

My husband spent part of that first day in the ER and the next two days in the ICU unit. Yesterday he came home with medication and directions to see a cardiologist ASAP.

Hive was a distant thought in my head, not completely gone, but so far away I couldn't deal with it. To me Hive is not a platform. Hive is not about crypto. Hive is people (sounds like a line out of Soylent Green, but the line expresses a truth for me).

My lovely co-team members in the Inkwell picked up the slack for me with such kindness and grace (thank you @gracielaacevedo and thank you @jayna) that my spirits were lifted.

I'm writing today to tell my other friends on Hive that my absence doesn't signify indifference. There is just no room, or at least there wasn't, for anything but concern for my husband.

I don't know what the next few days, or the future, holds for him or me. Hive has been going through a rough patch lately. I don't want my lack of activity to be interpreted as an indication that tough times are affecting my commitment. Far from it.

The more this platform, the Hive community, needs me, the more I will be committed to its success. It's just that, sometimes, life tells us we don't have a choice. Sometimes life tells us what we have to do and we must comply.

My husband is home, medicated, peaceful and relatively happy. I'm a little busy and very tired but I'm back, although perhaps with a more muted profile.

My husband enjoys my participation in Hive. Even when he was in the ICU unit (after his heart rhythm had stabilized) he was reporting to me on activity he saw on my account. He might have been hooked up to a heart monitor and an IV, but he was also hooked up to his iPad and his phone. He was following the news, watching a pool tournament, and checking on Hive.

What caused this episode? Hard to tell. As I wrote in my previous blog, he underwent microwave ablation of an adrenal tumor seven days before his heart episode. It is very likely that the stress of that procedure caused systemic inflammation and this precipitated the wildly irregular heart rhythm. Doctors in the emergency room did not seem to focus on that but I've been doing my reading and have learned that this connection is at least a strong possibility.

The next step will be to find out what caused the acute episode. Medications to treat an irregular heart rhythm are quite serious and can have grave side effects. We would like those medications to be prescribed for the right reason, if at all, so there is going to be a bit of serious detective work to come up with an answer.

Anyone who reads my blog knows I will take an active role in the detective work. So, I'm signing off from this brief blog. I will go check out the activities of the last few days on Hive and will do my best to support good posts.

Until next time, thank you for reading. Peace and health to all. Hive on!