After quite some time struggling to maintain active with endurance sports through sky-rocketing heart rates, I recently made en effort test and close monitoring during exercise that came out with Afib and flutter episodes. They are induced by the activity and I can train through them more or less, but after the trainings the flutter sticks for quite some time (from minutes to hours) before it reverts to NSR spontaneously. During daily, nonsport related routines the monitoring has also shown occasional flutter episodes sticking for hours and sometimes rather unnoticed. Need to disclose that I do not drink alcohol, I am pretty lean and carry an overall healthy lifestyle. Running and cycling activities are personally satisfying but I am quite mediocre and not competitive athlete.
After all the tests and discussions with my phisicians I am schedduled for ablation on Independence day (quite ironic isn't it?) and even though I am quite convinced that it is the right call I cannot help but having second thoughts.. sometimes. I have read a lot about this, including several threads here and Dr. John Mandrola's blog, and even some of the recent scientific literature on the condition and its management (I do life sciences research but not M.D). My second thoughts come from having such an aggressive and irreversible approach to a condition with which maybe I could live with, as I have done till now. I know that the most likely course of the condition is that it will become worse, eventually more persistent, leading me to be permanently on drugs and with an overall worse condition to endure future procedures... while I live scared to see my pulsometer over 200 during an easy run. But at the same time I am reading that the ablation approach is being overprescribed and it is a pretty aggressive, we could say primitive palliative approach to manage a condition whose true underlaying causes and prognosis are unknown. I can't help but think on the approaching to paranoid schizophrenia through frontal lobe ablation just a few decades ago... maybe I overthink this and it is part of my melodramatic nature.
So I don't know... I know that there are quite a few here that have gone through this road... and maybe some that made a U turn (I would be most interested to hear from these and how that worked for them). Others that went through it. Would you do it again?.
After all the tests and discussions with my phisicians I am schedduled for ablation on Independence day (quite ironic isn't it?) and even though I am quite convinced that it is the right call I cannot help but having second thoughts.. sometimes. I have read a lot about this, including several threads here and Dr. John Mandrola's blog, and even some of the recent scientific literature on the condition and its management (I do life sciences research but not M.D). My second thoughts come from having such an aggressive and irreversible approach to a condition with which maybe I could live with, as I have done till now. I know that the most likely course of the condition is that it will become worse, eventually more persistent, leading me to be permanently on drugs and with an overall worse condition to endure future procedures... while I live scared to see my pulsometer over 200 during an easy run. But at the same time I am reading that the ablation approach is being overprescribed and it is a pretty aggressive, we could say primitive palliative approach to manage a condition whose true underlaying causes and prognosis are unknown. I can't help but think on the approaching to paranoid schizophrenia through frontal lobe ablation just a few decades ago... maybe I overthink this and it is part of my melodramatic nature.
So I don't know... I know that there are quite a few here that have gone through this road... and maybe some that made a U turn (I would be most interested to hear from these and how that worked for them). Others that went through it. Would you do it again?.