Initially it was paroxysmal as most are. On again off again. Over time it increased to hours. One day I fainted. After they implanted the loop recorder, they found I was having pauses of up to 8 seconds each. The day they sent me to the hospital, the pauses were repeated and I knew it!
Eliquis will deal well with blood clots, but hemorrhagic strokes are a different story. When I had an ischemic stroke, the hospital didn’t deal with it properly. They couldn’t get my heart beat regular and overdid thinners or something to the point where it became hemorrhagic. So, I have a pacemaker to prevent the pauses and Eliquis to help with clots, but I still have AFib (they track me electronically) only 1% of the time, and there’s not much that I know of to stop a bleeding stroke. But I can live with the odds. I hope this is helpful. You’re always going to be balancing between what will help and what won’t. Just be as informed as possible and remember your body is unique.