Cathy, I do hope your DH gets to the doctor soon - I do not understand why some men put off seeing a doctor - it just does not make sense to me, but then perhaps I pay more attention to what women tell me! The dizziness and black-out spells can definitely be related to heart or artery problems, which can be very serious. My energy level is not up to where I would like it to be, but I think I will have to work very hard on it. I've had dizzy spells all my life, and in my 20s I was told it was due to hypoglycemia, which may still be partially the case. I'm going back to the doctor in mid November, and I'll see what he suggests then. My BP lately has been still been between 113/70 and 130/84, and it depends on the time of day and what I've been doing. I adjusted my dose of Metoprolol so that I take half a pill in the morning and the whole pill in the evening. That has seemed to even my BP reading out a bit. I'll try the thigh exercise to see if that helps. I have strong thighs and am good at doing squats. I wish I did not have to sit so much at work - I should make a point to take a walk around my work table more often - I have the largest office in the building, and then I can also take walks through the warehouse and look at the furniture! I like to see what finishes and fabrics people are putting on my chair designs! Lars

I have A fib and they attempted this procedure on me a few years ago. The procedure is not bad. Your leg will be sore for a few days and if they do like mine they will use a plug to plug the artery so it does not bleed instead of sitting with the darn sand bags on your legs for hours. Which I have had done before as well. I don't want to scare you but I also want to let you know what happened in my case which I will stress (IS NOT TYPICAL) My doctor suggested the procedure to me because they could not get my A Fib and other arrhythmias under control she told me it has a 98% success rate and they believed it would be a good option for me. I had this done at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston so a pretty good hospital I went in for the procedure and just be warned ( I was not prepared for this) they may shave your nether regions. I only say this because it caught me off guard but once they explained it I understood why but was still a bit of a OH moment lol. Anyways I went in to the procedure at 12:00 pm. They gave me some sleepy meds and put a bunch of monitors on me including what I thought at the time was 2 giant heart monitor pads on me one on the front of my chest and one directly behind it on my back both left side. They explained to me they would be doing the mapping and I may feel my heart rate go up and down if I was not completely asleep so not to worry. I was actually zonked out! They woke me up at 1:30pm and told me they had mapped out the areas they needed to and were about to start the ablation portion of the procedure. That is the last thing I remember until 4 pm when I woke up coming out of the procedure room. They took me back to the recovery room and my doctor was sitting there waiting for me. She kept lifting my gown and looking at my chest. I kept wondering why she was looking at my chest when they went through my legs. My husband came back to the recovery area and his hair was standing straight up and I could tell he had been crying. By that point I was talking, eating having a drink and everyone around me was acting really really strange. My doctor didn't leave my side, the nurses were fawning over me and my husband was loving on me like I had never seen. Something was up! I finally ask ok what is going on? Why do you keep looking at my chest??? The doctor then explained to me that I went into an A Fib attack on the table during the procedure and they could not get my rate until control and it had shot up to over 600 bpm and chemical conversion did not work and they had to Cardiovert ( use the DeFibber) on me 6xs to bring my rate back and they had had a really hard time stabilizing it even after that. I was like Ohhhhh ok now I understand. I had at that point never been cardio verted outside of using drugs. I still honestly didn't understand how bad it was until I got up to move. I found out they had went through both legs and what I thought was an IV bandage my other arm was actually where they had also went through my arm for something. I felt like I had been hit with a semi in the gut. I could barely walk I assume it was from the DeFib jolts. I was actually on my way home by 5:30-6:00pm after that. Once they watched my heart rate for a bit and made sure I wasn't bleeding they sent me home which shocked me. At that point I was a bit nervous to go home but they assured me I'd be fine (which I was) On the way home I asked my husband why he was so upset, I was fine, I felt fine when I woke up he explained to me then that he had heard the code called to the procedure room, right after the code was called they called him on the phone in the waiting room and told him there was a problem and poor guy had to sit there alone waiting to hear what happened to me all alone. I felt so bad for him. On the hour drive home I was sore but doing ok. When I got home by back and chest started to burn terribly. I hadn't taken my shirt off since I got dressed at the hospital but I kept telling my husband it was burning really bad. I finally went and got changed and when I took my shirt off my chest and back were burnt really badly in the shape of those big giant what I thought were heart monitors. They were apparently stick on defib paddles. I had 3 of them on my chest and back so each one must be good for 2 cardioversions. That night I was in so much pain, that the next morning I had to go to Urgent Care. They told me I had 2nd and 3rd degree burns on my back and chest from that. You don't ever see on TV when they use the paddles on people that they complain of burns or feeling like they have been struck by a semi. My doctor never explained to me that this was a possibility. As far as I knew I was going in for a simple procedure (which it is) but there can be issues. I wanted to let you know about them so that you aren't caught of guard like I was. After all of that they ended up aborting the ablation as they said I had too many bad areas in my heart and they would have to burn too many areas. So for me the procedure was not successful, My next option is a pacemaker/Defib combo which I am waiting for awhile to get. As I said please don't think I am trying to scare you. The catheter part in the legs and the procedure recovery is pretty easy. You do need someone to drive you home and you maybe sore in your legs for a few days, do not lift anything heavy until they tell you you can due to the entry site for the catheter it needs to heal and you need to watch it for bleeding. I was told before I had my procedure that after the procedure I may have a few fluttering episodes but not to worry about them it was normal. I wish you the best and a speedy recovery.

I've remembered a funny story about someone else who locked their keys in the car, and I helped them get back in. I live in a small country town, the kind where everyone knows everyone. I had just come out of the showgrounds hall, having dropped off my entries in the town's annual show (think "county fair"). Heading for my car, I saw a cluster of ladies I knew crowded around a car, shouting at it. Investigating, I realised that they had left the keys in the ignition, and the 3 year old in the car had locked the doors. They were trying to get the toddler to get the keys out of the ignition and press the fob to unlock the car. Now, this was a Toyota, and they used to have an ignition lock to stop the key being removed by mistake, so you had to do this weird press and turn (not unlike a childproof bottle cap) to get the key out. I felt this was beyond the understanding and manual dexterity of the average 3 year old, and asked, "Why don't you just ask him to wind down the window?" There was a stunned silence. Then one of the ladies said, "Oh my God, Colleen, we can tell you're a policeman's wife! That's brilliant!" I thought it was the obvious solution.

I don't know if I am more cranky than usual but I don't think if I bought a warehouse I would do what was done to that one, either. With the exception of some brick showing, it looks like surburban new construction with soffits and tray ceilings and such. I am not paying attention to the contents, some of which are interesting, just what they did to the building itself. Really, they were just looking for a certain amount of square footage of raw space in a certain location and it happened to be a warehouse. This whole thing could have been inserted in the first house in the thread as well. I guess part of this is that I knew people who at one time lived in lofts and warehouses and you could tell what they were. This I don't think you can. And, coincidentally we are demo'ing our current kitchen and since we have to Use it and the house is so small, and the cabinet guy is six months out After final shop drawings, we put a number of big heavy things on casters and dollies and we move them around (big storage cabinets, an oven), and that made me think that if I ever did live in a loft, everything except the bathrooms would have everything on wheels and you could just move it around.