Matters of the heart (2020 in the rear-view window)
In this newsletter, I won’t be talking about my hopes and dreams for love, but I promise the title isn’t clickbait. Instead, as I look back on a year in review, I’ll be talking about a literal matter of the heart. This year was certainly the weirdest I’ve ever experienced. Words like “unprecedented” and “unique” get thrown around all too often, and I’m sick and tired of hearing and saying them (and I’m sure you are, too). You’d be hard-pressed to find a newsletter from “generic company X” that doesn’t tell you to buy their new product in these “unprecedented times.” Yeah, the year was “unprecedented” but let’s not sugarcoat things, it was batshit crazy.
January 2020
This year is also the closest I’ve come to actually dying. I don’t mean “dying” in the sense of “Oh, that exam killed me” or “that was so funny, I’m literally dead” or “grad school is so hard, I’m gonna die.” I mean dead in the literal sense.
In January 2020, I went to the ER for the first time in my life. What I thought would be an uneventful night in bed watching Netflix turned out to be an overnight stay in the hospital. For the past couple of years, I’d been having some occasional heart palpitations. There would be periods when I could feel my heart beating incredibly fast or outright skipping a few beats. These didn’t bother me too much at first, since they came few and far in between and usually lasted around seconds to a few minutes; it was just something I lived with.
Fast forward to that night in bed, I’m pretty sure I was watching an episode of The Office (yeah I’m not that exciting). I felt my heart flutter like it had before, and wasn’t super concerned. This time felt slightly different, though. I put on my smartwatch and I decided to time how long this episode would last.
1 minute passed, not too worrying, I’m sure it’ll stop soon. 5 minutes passed, okay, starting to get a little concerned, but I’ll give it a few more. 10 minutes passed. This is when I started to panic a little bit. I don’t remember The Office being so exciting to watch and my previous heart episodes had never lasted too long. At this point, I decided to just walk outside on the sidewalk, 911 dialed into my phone in case I needed to call for an ambulance.
I eventually called for an ambulance and stayed overnight at the hospital. One of the paramedics (I can’t remember his name, unfortunately), spoke with me on the ride to the hospital. When we got to the topic of what I did for a living (student studying CS), he mentioned that he worked for Apple on their operating systems team before he became a paramedic. I’d really like to get a beer with him one day, seems like a person with an interesting life story. Long story short, what I was told I likely had (which was confirmed in September) was a disorder of the heart’s electrical system called Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome (WPW). I was able to be discharged from the hospital the following morning, and I ended up going straight to school where I had to TA a lab at 9am. In retrospect I really should have taken the day off, but I’m not a huge fan of missing school or work.
Things were uneventful between my ER visit in January and when I had the procedure to correct my heart, but I had one particular episode that I remember. I was biking along University Boulevard when I felt my heart skip a beat. I was luckily riding on a bike lane and I was able to quickly pull over.
I have a habit of wearing a watch, and I was wearing my smartwatch at the time. I was able to record an ECG which I’ve posted above. The top figure is my usual ECG, which is pretty normal at 69 BPM. The figure below is what I recorded when I dismounted my bike. 240 BPM is what my heart rate was at that time. I walked back over to my room and I was (luckily) able to get my heart back to normal. This was probably the time when I actually thought I was going to die.
First day of grad school (I missed it)
September 8, 2020 was the first day of grad school, but it was also the date when I had a procedure to correct my heart. Truth be told, I really didn’t want to miss the first day of class, even though everyone knows it’s literally the day when the prof goes over the syllabus that nobody really reads. It took a lecture and a beatdown (rightfully deserved) by my cardiologist for me to skip the first day and go to the hospital.
I was incredibly impressed by the procedure. WPW is a condition where there’s an additional (called an accessory) conductive pathway in the heart for electricity to travel through (very tl;dr). It’s possible at some times for this pathway to be triggered and effectively short-circuit the heart, forming a very small circuit (hence the high BPM). Common practice to treat WPW is to open a small incision in a femoral vein/artery and thread some very small and flexible wires into them. These wires are then guided through into the heart where they apply heat (or in the case of cryoablation, extreme cold) to the accessory pathway, effectively terminating the circuit. This is what’s called a cardiac ablation.
Needless to say, I survived the procedure (the drugs they had me on really helped) and I’ve never had an episode since! I actually went back to work the same day. Something that I really hoped I had time to ask was what kind of software they were using in the cardiac ablation machine, and whether it was formally verified. I honestly think a couple stints in the industry have really made me weary of production software. That said, I imagine most doctors would just look at me, politely reassure me that the software was safe, and think in their heads “wtf?”
The rest of the year
Now that I’ve got the biggest personal thing that’s happened to me this year out of the way, I can talk about some of the really important stuff. That said, a near-death event is something that really stays with you for a while so I’m probably going to digress here and there. Apologies.
I finished my first term of grad school, where I learned about programming languages, information visualization, and (to a lesser extent, don’t ask me why) formal verification (I’ll probably write a newsletter about these things sometime). There were definitely days and nights where I really questioned my place in this thing. That said, I think term 1 went pretty okay so I’ll see how term 2 works (is this induction?).
The pandemic has changed a lot of things. One of my favourite pastimes (going to movies alone) is effectively no more, and I haven’t seen some of my friends in person since March. I really do miss them. I’m not really that big of an extrovert, or a person that goes to a lot of social outings in general, so I feel like I got off easy. I feel like my time in the hospital earlier in the year has really informed my view of being ill and just being close to death in general. I wouldn’t wish that night in the hospital I had in January to anyone. If my social distancing means less people alone in the hospital, then I’m happy I can do my part.
This is the last newsletter of 2020. I can say that I’m leaving this year as a different person than who I was at the start. I think I’ve grown a bit into a person who doesn’t take things too seriously too much of the time, and a person who’s slightly better at just taking a break and smelling the proverbial flowers.
To you, the reader, I wish a happy new year. See you on the other side.