Ask Your Dad

Larry Creswell is a doctor, an athlete and has atrial fibrillation. We share two of the three (I dropped out of medical school at noon on the second day). He has been writing on the subject of cardiovascular health care, especially as it applies to older athletes with heart arrhythmias, for a long time. I have been following his articles, posts and advice as closely as I follow that of my Cardiology team at UW Med. He has a casual but precise writing style leaving most adjectives and adverbs to the fiction writers. He is no-nonsense and down to earth. He reminds me of what I could be if I chose to become an expert in one field, instead of insisting that a Jack-of-all-Trades will always find employment. The reason he is the focus of today's post is two fold:

1) His latest article contains a call to action that many men in my demographic (age group) need to hear, and,
2) It is a useful segue into today's recap of my experience with the aforementioned cardio arrhythmia.

We'll start with the latter, where I will attempt to summarize all the frothing water that has passed under my bridge since diagnosis WAY back in 2014.

Being undiagnosed with atrial fibrillation is scary. On at least two of my trips to the ER I had the feeling that I was not going to walk away. Once diagnosed, I unceremoniously failed all the procedures considered by modern medicine to be the sequence for correction. First the cardioversion. Three, two, one, BLAM, 260 joules pass from paddles to heart in the hope of jump starting it back into sinus rhythm. I will tell you about the nifty drug administered before this procedure at a later date. I failed cardio-aversion five times. Next comes ablation, a process where catheter is snaked up an artery and into your heart. Once there the skilled electro-physiologist snips, freezes or burns whatever nodes are hiding like a thief from the cops. Without the rouge nodes electrical interference, the heart usually resumes its regularity. The key word here is usually. I am not in the usual category. Oh for two. It was at this juncture that I was given a choice. I could take handfuls of drugs, some with severe side-effects, or…… have a pacemaker installed.

I opted for the pacer. That was almost four years ago. Things have been '''''OK''''' since that infamous procedure. I mean, I am still walking and taking and writing about it, so how bad can it be, right?

Here is the update part. I have been feeling 'crappy' for about a year. Fatigue, brain-fog, chest pain, arthritis, hypotension, loss of balance. The list goes on. The last few weeks I have been going into and out of A-Fib with alarming frequency. WORSE, it seems that every time we do a high intensity indoor spin session, as we did this morning, and can watch my heart rate monitor bounce between 120 and 242 as regular as a stoned metronome. I am in A-Fib as we talk. That is the bad news, good news I have also become fairly adept at getting back out. A quiet, warm, peaceful place where I lay flat on my back, totally relax and breathe deep, counting breaths until either I fall asleep or feel better, calmer and balanced. At most this takes a day. I remain unconvinced that stroking-out could be any worse than dealing with the symptoms trying to push 350 watts for 30 seconds. Like I said above, kinda scary.

Later today, after chores, I will upload pacer data to UW for analysis and recommendation.

There is my story, updated. I would not wish this on even my worse enemy (and praise the Lord I don't have any - well wait, Trump can have it), so please friends, read Dr. Creswell's article and heed his advice.

Take it from me, the best thing you can do, up front, is ask your Dad. Do we have any history of heart arrhythmia in our family?

Gotta run, have a great day, and thanks Larry. And thanks Dad (shown above after Boston 1997)