Author: Youseph

Cohost of the TransMissions Podcast. Writer, Blogger, Musician.

Not Fixing My Arrhythmia

I am back from Seattle now. Back to cold, wet, snowy Juneau Alaska. My trip did not fix my Arrhythmia like I and everyone was hopping. I have officially stumped the doctors at Virginia Mason and told that what I have was something that was not life threating and since I grew into this I could very well grow out of it. That is just a depressing answer to get from a doctor who specializes in hearts.  I will be doing some follow up visits with the local doctor and keeping in touch with the guy from Seattle. Will see what happens.

A few higlights from the trip are:

  • I got to see my dad who I have not seen in about 7 years
  • It took the nurses 6 tries to get my I.V. Started. (I passed out after the 3rd attempt)
  • The doctor was not able to poke my heart in a way to get it do it’s Arrhythmia thing. Nor was he able to get it to go crazy with drugs. Only after I swallowed water could they see the Arrhythmia which caused my doctor to laugh.
  • He called in other doctors to watch this who also laughed.
  • I was told that out of all my doctors colleagues only one had see something like this before about 20 years ago or so.
  • I was lied to about how much it was going to hurt.
  • I shared a recovery room with an older guy who had a hearing aid that would keep going off.
  • I was unable to obtain a video tape copy of the procedure to post to youtube.

Fixing My Arrhythmia

I will be heading down to Seattle next week to fix an arrhythmia of my heart. It was discovered a month ago during a doctors check up here in Juneau. What happens is that every now and then my heart starts beating really fast for no real reason. How fast is my heart beating? Well the doctors have clocked me at over 200 beats a minute. Not the best thing for your heart.

So my heart can go in to over drive for no reason at all. But it also happens just about every time i swallow. Which no doctor I have spoken with has ever heard of happening before. .

The procedure to correct this is called a “Cardiac Ablation“. It’s rather common and no one expect there to be any issues from it.

…ablation is a relatively non-invasive procedure that involves inserting catheters – narrow, flexible wires – into a blood vessel, often through a site in the groin or neck, and winding the wire up into the heart. The journey from entry point to heart muscle is navigated by images created by a fluoroscope, an x-ray-like machine that provides continuous, “live” images of the catheter and tissue.

Once the catheter reaches the heart, electrodes at the tip of the catheter gather data and a variety of electrical measurements are made. The data pinpoints the location of the faulty electrical site. During this “electrical mapping,” the cardiac arrhythmia specialist, an electrophysiologist, may sedate the patient and instigate some of the very arrhythmias that are the crux of the problem. The events are safe, given the range of experts and resources close at hand, and are necessary to ensure the precise location of the problematic tissue.

Once the damaged site is confirmed, energy is used to destroy a small amount of tissue, ending the disturbance of electrical flow through the heart and restoring a healthy heart rhythm. This energy may take the form of radiofrequency energy, which cauterizes the tissue, or intense cold, which freezes, or cryoablates the tissue. Other energy sources are being investigated.

Once this is all over and I am back on my feet I will write a follow up post.

I found the following links to be helpful for me when looking this up on line.

http://my.clevelandclinic.org/heart/services/tests/procedures/ablation.aspx
http://yourtotalhealth.ivillage.com/cardiac-ablation.html
http://www.sjm.com/procedures/procedure.aspx?name=Catheter+Ablation
http://www.hrspatients.org/patients/treatments/cardiac_ablation.asp
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/cardiac-ablation/MY00706