Hi mishel,
I had been experiencing heart palpitations since 2017 or so, but was not correctly diagnosed until 2020 with a Ziopatch wearable heart monitor. The first cardiologist misdiagnosed me with a normal heart ( totally missed the mitral valve prolapse & regurgitation), and missed the arrhythmia by only doing an ECG. Had increasing incidents and then one night my heart did flip flops for six hours. The next cardiologist only caught the atrial flutter. Then went to a big teaching hospital, and two top EP cardiologists there picked up on the Afib, too!
Each of them recommended a catheter ablation as a first-line method of intervention, and I could forego most of the drugs.
In retrospect, I think I should have first tried more natural means of treating the AF and AFL. The actual ablation took upwards of 4 1/2 hours, as the EP discovered I had a septal pouch wherein the aberrant AFL cells were percolating. It was difficult to ablate this hard to reach area, so I was under the anesthesia about 2 hours longer than predicted. I had two ocular migraines following the procedure, and was plagued by frequent PACs for over a year. I found these more bothersome than the AF! I also experienced other types of arrhythmias (SVT/AT/sudden rate drops) which were picked up by the implantable loop recorder necessitated by the perceived arrhythmias.
A recent brain MRI shows increased brain changes since an MRI taken just prior to my ablation. Could that be a result stemming from the prolonged sedation or minor infarcts from the procedure itself? Who can say for sure….
It’s over 4 years since the ablation, and I am still in NSR with those blips along the way. Thankful for the return to normalcy, but still wonder if I did the best thing for me.