Atrial fibrillation awareness

You’ve heard it before, an awareness month for a disease. Some of the most common ones get colored ribbons. Most of us have come to tune these out, until they affect us personally. That’s what happened to me with Atrial Fibrillation.

September is Atrial Fibrillation Awareness Month.

I’ll get to my experience, but first, the education part. In case you’re wondering if this is something you’ve experienced, the Heart Rhythm Society describes the symptoms as a feeling in your chest like “drums pounding,” “thunder rumbling,” or “fish flopping.” Essentially, Afib is a condition that causes an irregular heartbeat, one that may go into a high range. It isn’t immediately life threatening, but it can put people at higher risk of stroke, among a few other things. I’ve heard these described by other patients, but my experience was more subtle.

It was July 2014, just three days after my wife had been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. She was later concerned that the stress of her diagnosis may have caused my problems, but I never saw any correlation.

I woke up that Sunday morning feeling a bit weird. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I was slightly lightheaded. My heart rate seemed to be a bit fast and weak, though I wasn’t sure if it might just be my imagination. I asked my wife to take my pulse and she couldn’t get a good read on it.

She went on to church without me and I rested that morning. I wasn’t sure what was going on, but like a lot of people, without being sure, I was too stubborn to do the right thing and seek medical help.

I was still feeling off the next morning and called my doctor for an appointment. By the time I arrived, I had a bit of tightness in my chest and thought I might be having a heart attack. My dad had his first at age 35 and at 45, I had already exceeded him by a decade. My doctor sent me to the emergency room, which was about a hundred yards away anyway.

One thing you’ll learn is that no matter how busy the ER is, if you mention a heart problem, they get you in pretty quickly, like in seconds (I don’t recommend lying though). Plus, my doctor had called ahead and told them I was coming.

It was clear I was not having a heart attack, but my heart rate was jumping up and down, mostly hovering in the 160s. For several hours, they gave me IV medications, which seemed to bring my heart rate down--then right back up again.

Finally, they came and told me they were planning to shock my heart (cardioversion). This scared me more than anything so far. They said they’d a mild sedative, but that I might awaken as they were shocking my heart. Needless to say, this didn’t sound like a fun way to wake up, but it turned out I never felt a thing. My heart was shocked back into a normal rhythm and I was good to go (with follow up with a cardiologist).

The cardiologist monitored me, but it seemed all was fine. Off medications after a while and everything seemed normal, until more than three years later. It was last November and again I woke up in the morning with a fast, weak heart rate. I tried taking my pulse myself, but that wasn’t working well and after two attempts, I realized that I couldn’t manage more than a few minutes on my elliptical machine before running out of breath.

Since I knew what it was, I was a bit casual this time. I dropped my son off at school and went to my job at PC. But I stopped first by the college nurse’s office and asked her to get take my pulse. Sure enough, it was bouncing up and down.

This time, medication brought me back to a normal sinus rhythm after about thirteen hours, though the hospital kept me another 24.

Since then, I’ve joined a Facebook group for Afib and learned quite a bit. Some people have things that trigger them, such as caffeine or certain types of food. Amazingly, some people are in persistent Afib, meaning they never quite get relief. There are surgical procedures to try to freeze or burn off the misfiring parts of the heart, and sometimes they work.

Your heart is what keeps you going; if you have any of these symptoms, ask your doctor about it.