Not familiar with the paper this is from, but Atrial Fibrilation isn’t a heart attack (it can cause one, or a stroke). The human heart has 4 chambers, the left and right atria are on top and the left and right ventricles are on the bottom. In super layman’s terms, blood enters the heart from the lungs into the left atria and from the body into the right atria, passes through valves into the ventricles, and then is passed into the body (from the left ventricle) or the lungs (right ventricle). Normally the atria squeeze, there’s a slight pause to allow blood to enter the ventricles, then the ventricles squeeze. In A-fib, the atria just quiver, they don’t squeeze. It can be fairly benign and people can walk around for months without knowing they’re in A-fib because the blood will just drop into the ventricles and the ventricles do the work of pumping blood out into the lungs and the body. But the problem is that in A-fib some blood tends to hang out in the atria and it doesn’t completely empty, so eventually it can clot and now you have a huge clot hanging out inside your heart. If that clot decides to move it can go out into your body and end up in one of the coronary arteries (the arteries on the outside of your heart that supply your heart muscle itself with blood) and cause a heart attack, it can go to your brain and cause a stroke, or it can go into the lungs and cause a pulmonary embolism (PE). So usually people with A-fib are put on blood thinners to keep the clotting from occurring, or if the A-fib is too high of a rate (rapid A-fib) they’re sometimes given medication or cardioverted (shocked) out of it.

Like another commenter stated, in guessing they stimulated the vagal nerve which converted his heart rhythm into sinus rhythm, which is the normal heart rhythm.

So I take hours to fall asleep if I’m on a day shift schedule (I can go to bed at 9 or 10 and still be awake come 4 or 5 am) but when I work night shift and go to bed at 8 or 9 am I’m asleep within 15-30 minutes. I don’t usually dream that often, it seems to correspond more with my mental health. If I’m going through it I dream more. I think it’s both an escape mechanism and my brain’s way of processing things. Normally I don’t notice I start dreaming right away when I am in a full night’s sleep, but I’ve definitely hit the 5 minute snooze on my alarm, fallen back asleep, and had an entire intricate dream before the alarm woke me up 5 minutes later. I can also get incredibly amazing 3 minute long power naps and go from being dead on my feet to completely refreshed and ready to go for hours. No surprise, my sleep schedule is fucked. I work nights and go to school days and sometimes go 24-40 hours without getting sleep and actually function pretty well.

My partner at the time also witnessed both cats having a cat fight on top of me while I was asleep and said I never stirred. He also once found one of the cats sitting on my chest, slapping me repeatedly across the face and crying little distressed meows, unable to wake me. Now that I’m single I’m still a heavy sleeper, but I wake up if the cats call for me. I’ve also had a couple people throughout my life tell me that I’m such a still and quiet sleeper that they had to check my pulse because they couldn’t tell if I was breathing and they started to get scared.

A few years ago I had small unexplained tender bruises on my chest and arms that would not heal for several months, long enough that I was beginning to get a little concerned (is it cancer?).

One night I was lying awake at 3am when one of my cats chased the other into my bedroom and onto my bed. 4 paws came flying onto me, perfectly landing on each tender bruise before launching back off of me, then the other cat landed on me with his paws in the same spots before jumping off in chase of his furry friend.

Mystery solved, and that’s how I figured out just how heavy of a sleeper I am. My cats had been using my sleeping body as a launchpad for months and I was none the wiser until I happened to be awake.

Me all the time talking to my cat:

“Girl you are fat as fuck… … … It’s ok. Me too.”

We’re both working on it.

I live in an area that also has decent bus coverage with stops all over, although I’ve never actually taken the bus. I can’t take the bus to work because there aren’t stops where I need to go. I also attend school 19 miles away, and depending on traffic it’s anywhere from a 30-45 minute drive. Last year my car broke down and I looked into taking the bus to school for the few weeks I would be carless. It would have been a 5 1/2 hour trip each way, I would have had to take 3 or 4 buses, transfer between 2 different companies, and I would have had to walk several miles in between stops to get from the first bus company’s stop to the second’s. Realistically, I couldn’t have even left on time to make it to class or gotten back home while the buses were still running, even if I wanted to waste my life riding buses. I worked an extra 100 hours of OT that month to pay for my rental car.

Point well made, I agree.

I think sometimes there’s a sort of dark humor for some in exaggerating to the worst scenario in memes, knowing that it’s exaggerated, but then other people find it tiresome or too much. I don’t know, I don’t make memes, I just steal them.

I laugh at these memes because dark humor is my only way of coping.

It seems like there’s nothing else I can do. I don’t just care because it might negatively impact my life. Every time I look at the news (and for sure this is not just under Trump’s America, it’s been going on forever) more people are dying across the world in stupid wars because of stupid childish adults in power. And now our Antichrist President is stoking things up even more and even more people will die and it’s only to fuel his ego and his rich friends’ interests.

I vote, I speak up, I try to do my part and be the change and all, but what more am I going to do? I could stand in the middle of the street in front of the capital and scream how wrong this is but I’ll just get written up as another ignorant millennial lunatic and in the meantime I’ve been working sustained 50-80 hour weeks with no improvement in sight and can still barely afford to eat. Can’t change the government alone, especially not when there’s rent to pay and I’m bloody exhausted.

Emo kids unite