What do you do when you feel your heart racing, jaw pain, are light-headed and have cold sweats? If you’re me, after feeling as if you’d had some sort of heart attack earlier in the day, you wait until after doing an interview with Julianna Forlano on WBAI, then take yourself to the hospital!
I explained it all on the show today, so you can just click the play button at the top of this post to hear all the sordid details.
But the bottom line is that I had an SVT (Supraventricular tachycardia) episode. When I got to the Emergency Room, my heart rate was 155. Normal is 60-100.
They gave me some medication to bring it down, which didn’t bring it down far enough. So they gave me another IV medication for “conversion” – which, as I understood it, reset the electrical impulses controlling my heartbeat to reset it. Once they did that, I felt fine.
Needless to say, it was scary. And more than that, I couldn’t help but worry about what this episode will cost. Even though I have a very good insurance policy thanks to the Affordable Care Act, I’m sure my 10% co-pay will likely be enough to send my heart rate skyrocketing again. So, if you’re reading this and are in a position to help out, please click here and give what you can!
If we had single-payer, non-profit healthcare in the US, as they do in most of the rest of the civilized world, this wouldn’t be an issue. But we don’t, so it is.
Today on the show, we touched on a couple of interesting studies..
The first one deals with waste, fraud and abuse in Pennsylvania’s Charter Schools. The findings are sickening.
Kyle Serrette, Director of Education at the Center for Popular Democracy joined me to talk about “Fraud and Financial Mismanagement in Pennsylvania’s Charter Schools” that exposes at least $30 million lost to waste, fraud, and abuse in Pennsylvania since the passage of that state’s charter school law in 1997.
The second one deals with two issues that have been in the news of late: domestic violence and abortion access.
Rana Barar, Project Director of the Turnaway Study at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (or ANSIRH”) at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) told us about the study that documented a connection between abortion and intimate partner violence. The findings of the study, “Risk of Violence from the Man Involved in the Pregnancy after Receiving or Being Denied an Abortion,” suggest that being denied an abortion makes it harder to escape domestic violence.
Researchers found that having an abortion was associated with a decline in physical abuse perpetrated by the man involved in the pregnancy. But, among the women who weren’t able to have the abortion that they wanted, continuing the pregnancy didn’t lead to a similar drop. “This finding is consistent with our hypothesis that having a baby with an abusive man, compared to terminating the unwanted pregnancy, makes it harder to leave the abusive relationship,” the researchers conclude.
Tomorrow, the always amazing and informative Digby joins me in the first hour. For Flashback Friday, we’ll have a treat… Ryan Adams! If you’re not familiar with Ryan Adams (not Bryan Adams), please read these two articles (here and here) I wrote about him back in 2001, when he released his first solo album, Gold. He’s just released a brand new, critically acclaimed album that’s called, simply, Ryan Adams.
Before going solo, Ryan Adams fronted the band Whiskeytown. Their album, Strangers Almanac, remains one of my all-time favorites (along with Gold). Whiskeytown’s final album, Pneumonia, had been held in limbo due to record company issues. When it was finally released, I got to host a radio special to premiere the album. We’ll play that back tomorrow for our Flashback Friday segment as we head into the weekend… I hope you’ll join me for that trip down memory lane.
Talk to you then, Radio or Not.
