Post-op flop.

• Author: Kinney, David
• Position: Out Back

They were getting ready to roll him into the cath lab to poke holes in his groin and neck to snake a wire up his veins to zap nerves in his heart when the surgeon realized the procedure probably wouldn't work. Ed Martin took the news calmly. He had IVs going in both arms, a freshly shaved crotch and a sedative slowly melting the hard edges of reality like a tongue licking an ice cube.

Since his triple bypass, which he wrote about in last month's cover story, Ed has experienced daily bouts of irregular and skipped heartbeats, plus three episodes of what has been diagnosed as atrial flutter -- his heart bolts past 180 beats a minute, racing so fast there's no discernable pulse. As he says, with customary understatement: "It's scary as crap."

After glancing at EKG strips from the portable monitor Ed had worn for a month -- the first time the physician had seen them -- his primary cardiologist had prescribed something called a radiofrequency ablation. What that means is a surgeon would run a catheter that delivers an impulse similar to ultrasound to the part of the heart where errant electrical impulses were causing the upper and lower chambers to beat out of sync. Once he triggered the problem, he would use the device to ablate -- in effect, cauterize -- the section where the bad signal originated.

Ed liked the odds the doctor gave him. There was a 90% chance the procedure would be successful, and he could throw away the medication he was taking. Even if it didn't work, he wouldn't be worse off -- though there was a slight possibility, maybe 2%, that the surgeon would destroy the sinoatrial node, the heart's natural pacemaker. Then he would have to implant an artificial one, which Ed would have to depend on for the rest of his...