I saw my primary care doc the other day, and it went well. (Finally!) Turns out my echocardiogram looked good. What a relief. I only have to get through tomorrow’s stress test (yuck!) and a couple of other tests to fully see how my heart and lungs are doing, but so far, nothing is too horrible really.

The more I read about the atrial flutter thing, the more I see how my symptoms match up. The shortness of breath, chest pain, etc. The doctor said it’s totally genetic, and that makes perfect sense. My dad had Wolff-Parkinson-White, which is a kind of tachycardia that screws with the electrical signals to the heart, causing it to beat irregularly. He eventually needed a defibrillator/pacemaker to shock his heart back into normal beats, like a constant cardioversion thing.

After my stress test and wearing the heart monitor over the next week, the cardiologist will make the call on whether or not we will be doing cardioversion for me. He said that usually fixes it for a while in someone my age.

Then I’ll do the pulmonary test in a week to evaluate the COPD situation, but the CT scan of my lungs looked normal. It was the X-ray that showed the hyperinflation. The pulmonary function test will give the whole picture.

It’s been like nuclear hell in the desert lately. Yesterday it was 107 here and 118 in Palm Springs. Tomorrow it’s supposed to break records. What the hell is happening to this earth? No wonder I can’t walk more than 100 feet. No one can!

I’ve been stressing about art (as usual). I haven’t really done any sans a few sketches and tiny watercolors. I’m trying to make that okay with my soul, but it’s difficult. It’s tough not to be hard work for this long. I can thank my dad for that too. To him, I could never work hard enough. Nothing was enough. I’ve been thinking about that lately, and it’s pretty stupid trying to impress a dead man.

Also, the recent death of Sinéad O’Connor has me reeling. I don’t know how she died, but it’s very fucking sad. She was such a brave and special artist with the biggest bleeding heart that will be incredibly missed from this world, and I really hope she knew that. If she didn’t realize that, it’s even more sad than we think.