About time...

Wow, it looks like this is my first post of 2012. No excuses, this just sort of fell off my radar. I have some medical things coming up soon so I think that got me thinking about this blog and how I documented everything a few years ago when I was going through the whole liver thing.

My current issue is my heart and the AFib episodes that I have been having. I have been on medication for a few years for this and for the most part it was working well. I would have an episode about once every couple months and those were normally pretty short. However recently I have been doing some walking and it seems like it was triggering regular AFib episodes.

I was near Seattle for a couple weeks with work and I started exploring some of the trails around Redmond (home of Microsoft). The town is very nice and the walking trails and parks all over the town are wonderful. I was working pretty normal hours so each day when I got off work I would head to my room and get into some shorts and a t-shirt and then go walking. In the 12 days that I walked I put in 68 miles. I started with 3-4 miles and got up to 7-8 miles at the end. I was walking around 4 miles an hour so at the start it was about an hour a day and at the end it was around 2 hours a day. Unfortunately about 4 or 5 days into this I started having nightly AFib episodes. These became a daily event but it was always at night either while I was at dinner or later when I was in my room watching TV. However the last day of walking the AFib episode occurred in the middle of the walk (about 2.5 miles from the hotel). I slowed my pace and walked back to the hotel but after that I stopped walking (I was leaving town a couple days later).

After I got back home I didn't have any AFib episodes over the weekend but then on Monday and Tuesday at work I made it down to the fitness center and put in an hour between the elliptical and treadmill. Monday night I was fine but Tuesday night I had a 3 hour AFib episode that wasn't very fun. I called my doctor's office the next day and was able to see him yesterday. He indicated that exercise is one of the most common triggers of AFib. I have been exercising semi regularly for some time but for some reason the recent exercise must have been more intense and it really got the AFib going (10 episodes in 2 weeks).

So I am now going to have a heart procedure to try to get rid of the AFib. The procedure is called an ablation and the doctor will run a thin tube through my vein from my thigh up to my heart. The top of the tube will have a small balloon. This balloon will be placed against the 4 arteries coming into the top left chamber of the heart and in each place liquid nitrogen will be fed to the balloon to freeze the tissue and isolate the source of electrical signals in these 4 arteries. The date of the procedure is not set yet but it should be sometime in the next 4 weeks. I first will have a chest CAT scan so that they can get a good map of the heart before the ablation is done.

I will post more about the procedure over the next few weeks. It sounds like it is a 3 hour procedure and I will spend one night in the hospital and then will be off work for a day or two. I will remain on AFib medicine for a number of months after the procedure but hopefully after that I can be off the medicine.

My next post will be non-medical, I will bore you with my recent fascination with international soccer.