Ain't progress wonderful?!
Dean's been living with atrial flutter for 15 years and taking heavy doses of medications which tried (but wasn't succeeding) to keep his heart in rhythm and recently it may have bounced up into fibrillation. Nothing much to know about this just that the pump wasn't adequately doing the job. He's not had much energy.
So he was directed to an electrophysiologist cardiologist (a heart electrician) and got a sales pitch to sign up for a radiofrequency catheter ablation. High success rate! Get signed up today! And Dean did.
The procedure was done December 22nd. 4 hour operation. Overnight hospital stay. Doc was happy with stopping the flutter but did see a trace of fibrillation. Dean got to wear a heart monitor over the Christmas holidays to check the level of fibrillation. Unfortunately, the monitor had an electrical problem and beeped to indicate fibrillation as much as 25 times in a day. No doubt: a high stress level at our house until the doctor got to look at the EKGs coming from the monitor and found no bad EKGs just what looked like electrical interference. Whew!
More energy; less drugs. Pretty much a success! Dean's will be taking warfarin for the long term so when he tumbles into fibrillation the pooling blood in his heart will be kept from clotting. Clots are bad. Especially, if the clots traveled north toward the brain!
