AF & SVT

I have been under doctor's care for nearly eight years with AF and part-time flutter, and have had two ablations to stem the AF. The second ablation worked, thankfully. During all this time, I have joined and spent time on afibbers.org, a free site (donations welcome) where people with AF discuss their history, their treatment, experience with caregivers, and the outcomes of various remedies or treatments. Some work, some work only for so long, and some don't work at all...or poorly.
Also, as a Type A personality, I have to understand about all I can. When I was diagnosed with AF, I read, read more, read even more, and began to watch many informative and excellent videos put on by electrophysiologists (heart electrical disorder specialists and surgeons) on YouTube. Some are highly technical, some are for patients who need some guidance and rudimentary knowledge. I would recommend that route to you. It can't hurt, and it might help you to overcome some anxiety.
It is true from everything I have heard and read, on forums and in technical papers posted on Pub Med, NEJM, BMJ, NIH, and so on - SVT and AF will not kill you. However, it's not quite so cut and dried. Left untreated, and if you enter the last stages of AF, they being 'persistent' and 'permanent', your heart will remodel itself (that's the term). Remodeling itself takes time, but the changes are not healthy. The heart will want to stay in arrhythmia, and it begins to degrade in its tissues by developing fibrosis and collagen deposits which stiffen the chamber walls. This makes them resistant to changes in shape during contraction, meaning your heart will lose efficiency. In time, it may even result in an unfortunate term known as 'heart failure' (really more like 'cardiac insufficiency,' or a weakened heart....it does not really 'fail').

So, this means you have to do something. You are in the early stages (I'm guessing, although your cardiologist may be able to tell you that you have been in arrhythmia some time by now based on assessments of your heart's shape and condition...I dunno). Now is the time to take medicines designed to lower stroke risk and to keep your heart's rate low when it decides that it has to begin fibrillating again. At some point your heart may enter later stages and begin to fibrillate more often. By then, you would want to have been assessed by an EP to see if you would benefit from a catheter ablation. These, if successful, are day surgery that stop the chaotic electrical rogue signals from causing your left atrium to beat out of sequence and so frequently. It's something you should discuss with your cardiologist sooner rather than when your heart is behaving much more badly in the next year or three.

Hiya I’m Dave from Pa: I’ve lived with VT’s for about five (5) years. They got bad enough SVT that the meds couldn’t control them so my cardiac team put in an ICD. Still have episodes but at least I no longer worry about SVT’s.

@gloaming Always informative. Appreciate your dedication to helping others of us understand this malady we call AFib. I’m hopeful my Cardi will consider ablation for me after my visit next Tuesday. I don’t know which is causing me the most distress or discomfort, my AFib or LBBB. Will let you know next week how the visit goes. God bless.