Recovering

The procedure I went through on Friday went perfect according to the doctor. When I arrived I asked immediately for a pill to calm me down, and what I got was sent from heaven (Stesolid). All my nervous feelings were like blown away and I actually even started thinking that it was going to be quite interesting. I got there at 9.30 and at 12.15 they came and said it was my turn. At that time I was really hungry...

Anyway when down in the operation room I got some more Stesolid before they started preparing everything. This is a procedure where you have to be awake! They hooked me up with electrodes to the electrocardiogram to monitor the heart. they covered me up with blankets and sterile green sheets before the gave me local anaestethic in the groin. They sent up electrode catheters though the femural vein to the heart. They stimulated the heart in different ways to try and start the heart rushes i sometimes get and it felt like a god damn rodeo in my chest sometimes. When the stimulations stopped, it got so calm that I actually had to look at the monitor to see if If I really had a heartbeat hehe. Anyway they located a special type of AVNRT which basicly means that the impulses in the AV node sometimes circulates around causing the heart to beat twice as fast as normal. Its not a dangerous things, but it is uncomfortable. They decided to use cryoablation which means they locate the place where the impulses circulate and remove it by freezing it to -75 degrees, this will slowly kill the tissue and is a very safe method.

It took around 2,5 hours but it honestly did'nt feel that long. The doctor and the nurses were very nice and the doctor even showed me how the cryo ablation catheter worked. I wondered how he could keep it still inside the pumping heart and he said "have you ever tried licking on a frozen lightpole in -75 degrees? Your tongue would get quite frozen stuck" hahaha, its funny because its true.

After the procedure I had to lay completely flat for like 2 hours, and they put a large pressure bandage on me so that it wouldnt start bleding. Then I was allowed to lay in a 45 degree angle for like 2 hours, and they kept checking my blood pressure and bandage every 30 minutes. Then I was allowed to walk for 30 minutes and since it wasn't bleeding I was allowed home. I have no restrictions for my heart, I am concidered cured. However for the next week I'm not allwed to carry heavy things because they went into the large femural vein and it's a small risk that it might start bleeding until its completely healed. I feel completely fine except for a small pain in the groin :)

D-day

Jenny is sick so she can't join me today sadly. It would have been nice with the company but nothing to do about it now. Toine offered to go with me but well...I know he hates hospitals and he can only be with me for a short time before it's time for the procedure anyway and then he might have to wait for up to 5 hours until I am ready. So I think it's best for him to be at work surrounded by people and lots of other things to do and think about. It's a lot better than sitting all alone and nervous in a hospital corridor at least. Him being there or not will not affect the outcome of the procedure anyway but I'm sure it will go fine. Mom offered as well, she has no problems with hospitals but still...sitting and waiting for maybe 5 hours and being nervous and alone goes for her as well. Ill be fine :)

The first thing I'm going to ask for when I get there is some anti anxiety medication...

9.5 hours until check in...

Tomorrow is the day...

I have been so busy with the theater and other things that I haven't had the time to write here.

Anyway it's going great with the theater. All the people on stage are doing a great job acting and behind the stage we are giving each other hugs and support. Even though it takes up whole days and weekends, it's still fun and nice to be surrounded by friends.

I managed to take some time and go to the forest for mushrooms with my mom again 2 days ago. We got a decent amount of mushrooms, both autumn chanterelles and black trumpets. They are drying in my oven right now.

Well...tomorrow is the Day...the day with a big D. Tomorrow I go to the hospital to get my heart fixed. I have to be there at 9.30 and first they are going to do a Heart Echo on me. It's a simple ultra sound examination. And then it's time. It can take anything from 1 hour to 5 hours. I'm hoping for the shorter time because laying still for 5 hours looking up the ceiling is going to be unbelievably boring after a while no matter how interesting all the medical things surrounding me will be. As I expected I didn't really feel nervous until today, but the plan is to have my friend Jenny with me tomorrow so that will hopefully make it better. Toine hates hospitals so I'm going to spare him the agony of going hehe.

Now I have to prepare for the laundry time at 1pm...

Theater

Me and Toine are way too busy with the theater now so there isn't really anything else to write about. Toine comes to the theater rehearsal straight after work, and I spend the day at home making dinner and snacks to bring with so we don't have to be hungry. Most of the time the rehearsal ends way after midnight and Toine has to get up around 5 for work so he is pretty tired by now. Poor baby.

Tranquillité

The theater that I'm working with this time is called Minieola and if you are interested you can read about this years production on http://www.minieola.se (in Swedish).

I am responsible for the make up as always. I don't have a formal make up artist education, but I do have a good sense for colors. This is just something I do for fun! I also provided a portrait drawing of one of the theater characters that will be used on stage (picture of that will come later). Many of my friends are acting on the stage, and some family members are also there. My mother is on stage, and my father is helping out with the lights. Toine is going to try make time and join to help with the sound as well.

Here are some photos taken from rehearsal yesterday!

The show is starting.

The youthful priest of the village is doing a song and dance number on stage, mocking the unknowing mayor.

The old lady (my mother) is getting a cup of hot chocolate from the fragile wife to the barkeeper.

The old lady reads a perfectly sinful poem to her granddaughter, and the chocolate shop owner is listening in the background.

The barkeeper confesses his sin to the priest.

OH god, too many mushrooms...

Went to the country place today with my dad and Toine. I managed to talk Toine into going. His plan was actually to stay at home and work...on his free weekend...I said no way!

We came home with like 20 liters of freaking autumn chanterelles...they are oh so super tasty but god damn it it's annoying to first cut the foot of the mushrooms, then brush them all, and after that split them in halves to make sure there is no worms, eggs or slugs inside them and it's annoying because they are so much smaller than other mushrooms so it's just time consuming. It takes almost twice as long to clean them as it does to pick them... We picked some small black trumpets, a few yellow chanterelles (but the season for those is almost over), quite some red-yellow trumpets and of course autumn chanterelles. News for the day is that I finally found a nice specimen of Porcini mushroom (Boletus edulis). In Sweden we call it "Karl-Johan mushroom" and I seriously have no idea why. Anyway it's one of my favorite mushrooms but for some reason there aren't that many of them this year...But the season for those is just getting started so hopefully there will be more of those soon!

Important news

Yesterday at the country place went quite good. I got my fair share of autumn chanterelles which I now have to clean. That's the boring part! Afterwards I spent the rest of the evening at the theater rehearsal. It's going to be a good show. It's not the same as the one I do in the winter, it's almost the same people however but instead of a show composed with many small sketches and parody material, this show is based on the novel "Chocolat" (there was also a movie made). Anyway I'm going to be busy the next few weeks with both school and doing the make up for the theater!

And now to the important news. I finally got a date for my heart procedure (September 25th) where they will either burn or freeze away the extra electrical pathway I have in my heart. It's a simple procedure where they insert small catheters into a central blood vein, let them travel to the heart, then with electrodes they locate the position of the pathway, and then either freeze it or burn it away with microwaves. I'll be awake all the time and if all goes good I get to go home the same day! This is something I have been waiting for all summer. Sadly it's theater performance on that day but hopefully they can manage without me for one day hehe.

Country place tomorrow yay!

Today I had the first meeting with the teachers that are going to guide me and Jenny on the way to writing the most perfect C-essay ever hehe. Anyway the teachers are nice, and seem very competent unlike the previous one we had last term.

Tomorrow I'm going to the country place again. Grandmother is going to pick me up in the morning and my mother is coming to. I'm not sure if my sister is going too but it would be fun if she did. Hope fully we get a nice share of mushrooms! Directly after the country place me and my mom has to go straight to theater rehearsal.

Funny clip

My mother just posted this one on facebook. I thought I'd share it here since I laughed so much I almost peed my pants! Basically its Tim, trying to eat breakfast with a TENS (Transcutaneous Electric Nerv Stimulator) connected to his right arm.


(TENS sends electrical impulses that stimulates the nerves, which makes the muscles contract and also makes the body release it's own natural pain killers.)

Birthday party

Today my family and grandmother came over to celebrate Toines birthday. I cooked some nice food with the chanterelles Toine picked over at the country place. Sadly my sisters started to argue after dinner about stealing each others style. I don't get it. Yvonne steals Elins pants, Elin steals Yvonnes hair conditioner and now Elin got the same perfume smell as Yvonne and apparently thats worth fighting about. It made me both sad and upset, they are grown ups and should be able to act like it but instead they started pushing eachother and Yvonne looked like she was basically gonna kill Elin so I pushed her away and yelled at her to behave. I am sorry about the pushing back, but at the same time I feel it wasn't necessary for both of them to ruin Toines birthday party like that over such a trivial matter as perfume...It made me quite sad.

Anyway the food was absolutely delicious and Toine got a gift card at Kappahl for clothes and The matrix triology in blue ray like he wanted so I think he was happy. We had cake afterwards and watched a movie called "Men who hate women" (Män som hatar kvinnor). It was a good movie.

Chanterelle Tagliatelle

about 100g tagliatelle per person
as much chanterelles as you like
about 90g Pork tenderloin per person
Garlic
Parsley
Chicken bullion
Flour
Butter
Cream
Milk

Start by frying the chanterelles in the butter. It has to be real cream butter and not margarin. The cream butter brings out the flavours of the chanterelles better. Fry them long until most of the water is gone and they start to get crispy. Add some flour, maybe 2 table spoons. It will help to thicken up the sauce later on. Now fry the tender loin lightly (it's going to boil with the sauce, you don't want it to get dry). Press a garlic clove into the chanterelles and add some cream. Heat it up and stir well. when the sauce starts to thicken, add some milk and make it the concistency that you desire. Put in the tender loin and a cube of chicken bullion. Taste it and add some salt if needed. Boil the tagliatelle until it's ready, top the sauce of with some parsley and serve with a nice salad.

Long day

I've spent the whole day basically sleeping and cleaning mushrooms but now all the black trumpets are drying in the oven at least. Toine is as I said before on kickoff and I got a message saying they made him IT co-worker of the year! I can't help feeling a little proud of him. He is working so hard, I'm only worried that he's gonna burn himself out way too early but he keeps saying that he won't so I guess I have to trust him. Now I'm gonna try write some texts for the theater!

What a night

They called me yesterday around dinner time asking me if I colud please work a night shift because they were going to get a very special patient and thought they might need an extra person. The night went better than expected and was very calm actually so it was no problem. But since it was Toines birthday yesterday I couldn't just drop what I was doing and take a nap. Plus I also had loads of mushrooms to clean. So I ended up having to be awake for 24 hours traight. It was a long time ago since I did that. So I came home at 7.45 in the morning, just in time to kiss Toine good morning before he left for his kickoff! And i woke up now at 3pm.

Yesterday I gave Toine the ''ABC of the house'' book. Basically it's a book that has every renovation action in it explained. Everything from putting up wallpaper, to making new walls and building a new ceiling. Not that we need a new ceiling in the apartment. But there are other useful things in it as well.

The discovery of the black gold

It's Toines birthday today! Now he's turning 24 years old!

I didn't have time to write a lot lately. On Tuesday my school started again. Not that it was anything to brag about, just some course introduction and registration. The next ten weeks we are going to write our bachelor degree essay (C-uppsats) which means we won't have many classes at campus, instead there is a lot of own work at home.

Wednesday was a lazy day for me. Since I've been so busy with mushroom picking and all those things I decided to just do the laundry and dry my mushrooms. You can dry them in the oven, just make sure that it doesn't rise over 50 C or else the mushrooms won't taste as nice. Keep the oven door slightly open for some circulation and have a thermometer in there so you know if it actually rises over 50 C. A digital one with a small extra receiver is always nice, then you can watch tv or whatever and just watch the monitor every now and then!

Thursday (yesterday) my mother, my sister and I took the train up to the country place and grandmother picked us up. The plan was to pick blueberries like maniacs, but I forgot my berrypicker at home so I didn't get as much as the rest of my family. But it's ok. Then we decided to pick some mushrooms at some new places. In the beginning it didn't go as planned. We didn't find any good places. And when we did find good places, we didn't find any mushrooms... We were quite disappointed, and hungry, so we thought ok...one more place. We get to a crossing and there is a field full of sheep nearby...me and my mother looks around, thinking about entering the forest to the left, but my grandmother thinks we should to to the right one. It looks small, and not very promising, but since we were all hungry we thought ok. Lets take the small one so we can get away from here and finally get some food.

After a little while both my mother and I find a few yellow chanterelles so we think ok...atleast there is a little bit of mushrooms here after all...so we go further. Under some pine trees I see a rare delicacy, 4-5 black trumpet mushrooms (Craterellus cornucopioides) The mushroom I have only seen 2 times before in my life, so this was the third time! I decide to not say anything to my mother, who is walking on the other side of the trees. It was no big deal. 4-5 ones you can't really do anything with anyway. I search forward a bit and find Autumn chanterelles (Cantharellus tubaeformis) which I start picking off. Then I hear my mother shout that she found some black trumpets. And I think why is she always the lucky one?! After a while I hear her scream! She screams uncontrollably and tells me to come over there and hurry! what do I see? The biggest field I have ever seen of black trumpets!!! And they are bigger than ever! My mother was nice and shared it with me. Her bucket was full anyway so I called my sister on the phone and asked her to come over with some paper bags. On the way, my sister found some more yellow chanterelles and she also found some black trumpets of her own!

The trumpets in the forest!

I've never in my life seen so many of them!

And I've never in my life seen so huge ones!