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hole in the heart

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

I went to get my heart checked for a hole between the two halves. This hole is supposed to be linked to aura-inclusive migraine, of which I am a life-long sufferer. They looked into my heart to check things out, and when they decided that it all looked well, they punched a feed in the vein of my right arm and pumped in 'agitated' saline water.

This they agitated by hooking up two plunged gizmos (one full of saline) to the intake end of the thing in my arm and plunging the stuff between the two gizmos (they're similar to the things you normally get shots with, employing a rubber diaphragm and a thumb-push rod in a plastic cylinder). Sure enough, you could see the small air bubbles forming in the saline.

So with this salty mix shooting into my heart while I "bore down" ("push like you're taking a BM", they inadvisedly advised my IBS self) the trick was that the bubbles would pass through the starboard side of my heart and into my lungs, where they would be transferred into the air. If there were a hole between the two sides of my heart, the bubbles from the saline would appear in the port side as well.

But they didn't. I have no hole in my heart.

So relatively easy no fix for my migraines. But I got to see and hear some interesting stuff. Now I know what my heart looks like in an ultrasound image.