I was going to post this yesterday, but I didn’t want everyone to think it was some sick April Fools joke.

 What Made it Shitty

Sunday I went next door for the neighbor’s kid’s birthday party.  While sitting on the couch I began to “space out” and feel really strange- it felt like my brain was pudding and everything was processing really slow.   Thinking I was coming down with something, I excused myself from the party, walked back next door to my house, and laid down on the couch.

Within a few minutes I started feeling a “fluttering” sensation in my chest that I at first thought was gas or indegestion (we did have TRIPPLE chococlate cake at the party after all).  A few minutes later I started experiencing what felt like  my heart stuttering and skipping beats.

Realizing now that something “bad” was wrong I told my wife to take me to the emergency room.  We got in the car and took off but before we got to the top of the neighborhood I started having extreme pain in my chest.  It’s hard to describe the pain other than to say on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the worst pain I have ever felt, it was a 10.

I told my wife to turn around, we went back to the house, and when we got in the driveway I gave her my cell phone and told her to call 911, that I thought I was having a heart attack.  She went hysterical, yelled at the neighbors, and they called 911.

Took the ambulance ride to the hospital, spent 4 hours in the ER while they stuck 21 little EKG leads to every patch of hair on my body, and then eventually admitted for monitoring.  I got a spify sonogram of my heart (it’s not just for babies!) and a rash of other tests.  I spent two nights in the hospital while the ICU monitored my heart through a spiffy little wireless EKG deal.  After infusions and some oral heart drugs they finally managed to regulate my heart beat.

I was discharged yesterday around noon and went home where I promptly went to sleep.  In the hospital they woke me up up every hour to take my vitals and it takes me about 45 minutes to fall asleep.  You can do the math on that one- I was exhausted.

Today I went to a follow-up with my primary doctor.  I have prescription for beta-blockers to regulate my heart beat and they seem to be working.  I’ve got more tests ahead of me for the next 3 weeks at the least, so this will be an April Fools that will keep on giving.

All we really know so far is that I don’t have bad valves, I didn’t have a heart attack, and its more than likely a birth defect (or possibly the result of an infection of some sort when I was a baby- I was in the hospital for days with a bad infection when I was an infant) that is causing me the trouble.  My heart is having a hard time regulating its rate- sometimes its too fast, sometimes it skips 1, 2, 3 or more beats in a row, etc.   It more than likely became noticeable recently because of stress and/or age.

I’m fine now though- the pills work and I’ve got more tests to figure out what is going on.  I’m a 27 year old guy who doesn’t get to go through life thinking I’m indestructible anymore, but I’ll live!

What Made it Shitty-er

Sunday, while my heart was having hardware issues, the Secure Delivery server started having issues too.   This affected some users Sunday night / Monday morning and resulted in an inability to connect to the site for some people.  Jacob was able to keep the server running while I was laid up, so downtime was minimized.

We planned to upgrade the hardware for Secure Delivery sometime in the next 3-6 months due to increased load on the servers (the best problem to have, right?), but the current data center issues have prompted us to upgrade now.  We already had an upgrade plan in place, so its just a matter of provisioning the new hardware and migrating the accounts over- Jacob is working on that now.

We are going to mail all users once we have migrated to the new hardware and the problem is resolved, and we are going to offer everyone a refund of their full month’s subscription if they felt inconvenienced during this rough period.

So yeah… its a shitty week.  I’m laying low and taking a break.  Secure Delivery and some issues, but Jacob is upgrading it  to some bad ass new hardware (8x the processor power, 4x the memory, 25x the space, etc…) that will support thousands of users and be quite a screamer for current users now.

If one of you guys emails me please pardon a slow reply this week- between doctor tests and sleeping the day away I won’t be spending too much time at the computer, but I will check every day.