At the end of May 2025, my partner (Shaz) and I went to buy a new house. We had inspected it a few times previously and loved it. It was the day of the auction, and we went out for a morning walk with the dog and my heart started doing a weird thing: it started beating really really fast. It sustained the pace for about 5-10 seconds, then returned to baseline. Then it would repeat this about every minute. I put it down to the stress of the auction.
We went to the auction and we were the only bidders, and got bumped up a few notches by vendor bids, and then settled on a final price. All through this time my heart was still doing its slow-fast-slow switching every minute or two. Still putting it down to stress. We sign the contract for the house and so on, and the heart is still doing its thing.
Sunday morning rolls around and it’s still going slow-fast-slow. I start up the heart rate app on my Apple Watch and clock a 160 while lying completely still in bed. Then a 170. I switch to the ECG and I see my heart stopping for about a second, then beating rapidly and then resuming a regular pace. A flat line is not the kind of line you want to see on an ECG.
This continues all through Sunday, and I’ve not let anyone know. Then I mention it to Shaz in the evening and I say I’m going to the Emergency Department. We have a good conversation about how I’m an idiot for not doing this sooner. I get in there, tell them about my condition and they hook me up to a heart monitor for a few minutes. It does not catch the condition. I stay there for approximately 6 hours, un-monitored, and then I’m told that I should be alright to go home. I get home at 2am.
Throughout the next week, it happens more than a dozen times every hour. It gets to Wednesday night and I’m at trivia with my friends, a few ciders deep and my heart is going off every single trivia question. That’s a quicker pace than it’s ever done. On Wednesday night I’m exhausted from trivia and the week in general, so resolve to go to the Emergency Department on Thursday morning. I put it off due to my nothing-burger of an experience on Sunday/Monday.
Thursday morning, I go into Emergency Department, let them know I was in Sunday (no, they don’t do “fifth visit is free!” loyalty cards) and they immediately hook me up to an ECG. Within seconds it’s going off its nut. The heart rate indicator flashes yellow briefly and it goes beep-beep-beep before it flashes a faster red colour and goes BLART-BLART-BLART. The heart rate reads at ~180bpm. I’m in a hospital bed. I only hit 180 on the regular towards the end of my workouts or on a tough bike ride.
They give me medicine called Metoprolol. It quietens the condition for a few hours, and it starts to kick off again just after dinner time. I get a photo of the machine reading 173, but that’s only because it changed when I went to capture the 193 it flashed up right before that. I’ve never seen a 193 during a workout.
I’m given another dose. It goes quiet again for another couple of hours, and kicks off again around 3am. The machine is doing its beep-beep BLART-BLART-BLART routine and I’m a light-sleeper at the best of times. It doesn’t help that this is a shared room and someone in the bed across the way is a worse snorer than me. I put some earbuds in and blast KGLW’s PetroDragonic Apocalypse on loop all night. It actually works and I get back to sleep.
The morning comes and I’m sent home with a referral to a cardiologist and a heart clinic and a prescription for the meds I was on. I immediately take that prescription and get the meds, taking two a day to keep the heart calm. They discharge me with a suspected condition called SVT.
The referral to a heart clinic leads to me getting a Holter Monitor, not in Warrnambool but in Colac, a 3-hour return-trip away. At the end of June. The Holter Monitor is hooked up to me and I look part-cyborg. I wear it for 24 hours, during which no events happen … because I’m religiously taking the medicine the hospital prescribed.
The referral to the cardiologist leads to a phone call a month later while I’m in Melbourne. They say they’ve got a booking the next day and could I come in for that. I say I can’t make it because of a prior commitment and ask when their next available appointment is. They tell me the 3rd of February, 2026. Yes, 7 months later for a heart condition.
That appointment rolled around just this week gone. I am now on my third “bottle” of prescription pills, thankfully only costing $13.75 for 100 pills (and I take a half-dose) because I live in a country with socialised medical care. A++ would recommend to others.
I drive the 3 hours to Geelong and arrive early at the clinic. When I get in to see the Cardiologist, I can see his computer screen. He pulls up my record and makes a face. There’s no referral data there, at all. Nothing from the hospital. Nothing from my GP. Nothing from the clinic. I end up showing him the ECG results I recorded on my Apple Watch and he hesitantly accepts those. He makes suggestions for what it could be, but is unable to diagnose the condition. A follow-up appointment gets booked, and they tell me they’ll mail out a letter like it’s eighteen-bloody-fourty-six.
On the 3 hour drive back, I have a long time to make enquiries as to who fucked up here. I call the hospital. I call the clinic. I call the GP. It is unclear who has what information, and I ask each to send me everything they have. I put on my best “Customer Service” voice and approach each call with the attitude of: “this person I’m speaking to is not responsible for this issue, they’re a messenger”.
All last week and this week I’ve been troubleshooting work issues. This week I worked Monday, off Tuesday for Cardiologist, and worked Wednesday & Thursday. We’re in the end-phase of a migration project that’s been going since April, cutting merchants over from one payment processing system to another. We acquired another company in April, and we’re porting all of their merchants over to our systems as best we can. This process is not without its issues, as we have well-and-truly discovered since almost day-dot.
Simultaneously to this, we have other parts of the business handling money-in and money-out for merchants. I learned very early in business that people are sensitive to money issues. And fair enough because money is oxygen for businesses, and money is how we as people survive in this world. What ends up happening is that the bank can be late in their payment, which makes us late in our payments. We’re talking millions of dollars here. Ultimately, everything reconciles out and all the money gets to where it needs to go. When there’s a hiccup, it can feel pretty stressful.
In the past, I have glibly remarked to others that when there’s been issues with money that: “at least nobody’s gonna die”. My viewpoint there is that yes, the job is stressful, but nobody’s going to die if the money takes an extra few hours to arrive. I’m trying to set perspective for myself and for others. It works (for me), but barely.
These work issues that I’ve been troubleshooting come through our support email and these emails can vary in description from “it no work good” all the way up to drawing a big red target on the issue and putting a neon sign abve it saying “right here, this one”. Such is the nature of any support line. I like the target issues because they’re easy, but I also like the “no work good” ones too, because I’m a sicko for a good puzzle.
In a lot of the cases of both, I’ve been helping triage those issues by reading through what the merchants have written and attempting to diagnose the issue. This isn’t always successful. In those cases, I’ve taken the liberty to do a radical thing and call the customer on the phone. Radical, I know. Then when that’s not worked, we’ve gotten on a video call and walked through the issue. Both of these have been immensely helpful to nail down some tricky issues pretty quickly, without having the messages bounce up and down the chain of me -> support -> customer and back again.
There’s been some pretty obvious bugs, including one which was a LIKE that should’ve been an ILIKE that I wrote about three months ago. Mea culpa.
There’s been some more nefarious ones like if these 8 interlocking things are all true but these other 3 things are false then we’ve gotta do a thing.
It’s been helpful to consult with the customers and walkthrough these issues with them and to work with some really awesome people on my team to further diagnose and fix these bugs in a timely manner. I think we ended up shipping over twenty changes over the week in response to these issues and other feedback. It was pretty productive despite being so short a week.
Then we get some customers who are (rightfully) upset that the new system isn’t working the same way as the old system. The two aren’t one-to-one compatible because the new system is a re-implementation of things from mostly spoken-word generational-lore. It’s been a swell time. Many learning and development experiences were had. “If I was to have my time again” has been bandied around a lot.
These customers demand immediate rectification of the issues, lengthy explanations of what has happened, and guarantees that all attempts to use the system will be bug-free on an on-going basis. Anyone adjacent to software for any length of time knows full well that the rectifications aren’t going to be immediate, that the explanations will be patchy, and the software will contain bugs.
We listen to their concerns, make Jira cards about the issues and set about fixing them. We write up explanations of how the bugs can occur, and estimate how long it’s going to take them which, again, as we all know, is a precise art.
One “great” thing about payments is that in some cases we can’t know if something’s going to succeed in production until it’s attempted. So we let those customers know that the known bugs have been fixed, they re-attempt some payments, and a subset of those payments fail. We fix those bugs or tweak those configuration settings, and get them to try again. Understandably, people are hesitant to “test in production” when it involves real people and real money, but such is the nature of payments. This usually takes a few tries to iron out most issues.
As the issues are being ironed out, tempers flare as other bugs pop up further “down the road”. Those bugs get fixed as well. Payments are complicated. I reply back and say that the team is working as hard as they can on rectifying issues, which is the honest truth. It falls on deaf ears.
Today, the follow up cardiologist letter arrives. The next available appointment is on the 18th of August. 1 year, 2 months and 2 weeks since my initial admission to hospital. I get quite angry about this and fortunately I’m home and nobody’s around to witness how I react to this news. I recover and end up taking the dog for an overdue walk to the park. She runs around like a doofus and brightens my day.
I come back from the park walk and start making some more phone calls. I call everyone I called on Tuesday and follow up the paper trail for my heart condition. I explain the situation calmly and with empathy, because I know these people aren’t the ones directly responsible. They’re just the messenger.
What sits in the back of my mind the whole time is this: “what if my heart failed during this call?”. I’m home alone today with nobody else except the dog and two cats. The other people in this house arrive back here in four hours time. If my heart does decide to go “bad”, will I have enough time to call emergency? That same question sits in my mind all day, every day.
In payments, at least nobody is going to die. But with this heart condition and this massive delay on treatment (14 months and counting), maybe somebody is going to die – me. And maybe it could be prevented by someone doing something as simple as sending an email or a fax, and having the process expedited by that.
I intend to find out what records people have about my stay in hospital and visits to the various clinics. I intend to get paper evidence of all of this. And I intend to do this in a way that is not demanding immediate rectification, lengthy explanations of what happens and guarantees of a flawless system. Because I know that people are falliable and make mistakes. I will choose in this situation to use my heart instead of my club.