Cardiac Ablation for Atrial Flutter

It was 1996 and I happen to be in Barcelona, Spain, doing the after college backpacking thing. We have just gotten a room and my heart suddenly started beating erratically- I thought it would beat out of my chest. It was a little concerning, but I recovered in a couple of hours. That was the first time my heart freaked-out.

It happened a few more times in the coming years and I asked my doctor about it. He said that I should try to get to an ER when it happened next so I could get an EKG, which tracks the electrical impulses in the heart. Soon after, I did, and the ER docs told me the rhythm was called “atrial fibrillation”, which is an abnormal heartbeat usually affecting older people. It's not disease, but an electrical malfunction with no known cause for me.

It wasn’t life threatening, but I needed to be able to get to an ER if it didn’t convert back to a normal heartbeat over 12 hours. Over the next few years, I lived with it and had to go to numerous ERs and even had to be cardio-verted 2-3 times (CLEAR!)

The atrial fibrillation wasn’t a huge problem, but was a huge pain in the ass. I saw a Cardiologist who gave me 2-3 different drugs over a few years that didn’t do anything. Then I saw another Cardiologist, who gave me different drugs, still with no net effect. The atrial fibrillation was persistent.

I learned about some surgical options, but the procedure for atrial fibrillation was complicated and had a low success rate. I really wanted to get something done.

Recently, I had an episode of the fibrillation and had the EKG sent to my cardiologists office. He looked at it and mentioned that it didn’t show atrial fibrillation, but something called atrial flutter, which is much more treatable.

We went back and got all my old EKGs and found that I had been mis-diagnosed all along. I had never had atrial fibrillation, but atrial flutter for the past 9 years. Aside from the thoughts of incompetence and negligence in the past, I started exploring the treatment.

Tomorrow I’m having a procedure called catheter ablation, that is supposed to be the fix for atrial flutter. Basically, they send a couple of wires (catheters) into my heart from two different points (groin and shoulder) and use the wires to burn (ablate) a part of the heart that is causing the weird heartbeat.

It’s supposed to be low risk and have a high success rate. I’ll report back here once it’s done. This is very good news being that we're about to leave the country for a very long time.