After two episodes of tachycardia, and two trips to the ER a few weeks ago, I was diagnosed with Atrial Flutter and will getting a catheter ablation on Monday.
How did yours go?
Both my dad and aunt had one done this year, both amidst COVID this summer. Both went really well and the recovery was pretty easy. They didn’t start feeling markedly better, with higher energy and stamina, for up to a few months after. Their pacemakers no longer report any incidents of AFib so for both it seems to have been a great success.
Frankly, in the case of my dad who was really healthy until his first severe AFib incident, I’m really pissed that this wasn’t the doctors first course of action. Installing a pacemaker and his subsequent episodes have taken a toll on him.
I’ve had paroxysmal AF for over 10 years. Paroxysmal means it starts and stops on its own. At first medication made it go away but about once a year it would come back. The dosage of my meds (Flecainide Acetate and Bisoprolol Fumarate) would be increased and it would go away again. It got to the point last year that I was on the maximum doses so had an ablation in September 2019. Immediately afterwards the dosage of Bisoprolol was cut in half. I was still having bouts of AF but over time they’ve gotten shorter and further apart. Currently I might have an hour of AF about once a month.
The procedure itself wasn’t too bad. Arrived at the hospital early on a Thursday morning, into the cath lab and knocked out around 9:00, and back on the ward and mostly awake by around noon. Stayed overnight and was released just after noon the next day. Felt a bit weak for a couple days, and the bruising around my groin was epic.
I had one 10 years ago, for flutter. Not much to it, really. Didn’t have to stay overnight. No problems since then.
Thanks. This is in line with what my doctor has told me. Fortunately, I’ve had no pain or discomfort in the two episodes of tachycardia, just heartbeat around 150 bpm until I got to the ER and they slowed it down with adenosine. With luck, it should all be cleared up with the ablation.
Yes. I had it under local anaesthetic and massive doses of morphine due to lung issues, and was able to actually watch parts of my heart being burned away. That was pretty awesome.
There was one point in which my oxygen levels or something went a bit wrong and a couple of extra people came in. Apparently that’s common.
I was utterly exhausted and useless for a couple of days afterwards, moreso than I expected. There was otherwise no pain, and it was utterly untraumatic.
I put off an ablation for a couple of years mostly out of a fear of the procedure. I finally had one three years ago and found it much easier than I feared. It was successful, I’m glad I did it, and would not hesitate to get another if necessary.
After lots of research I learned that the single most important thing you can do is find an electrophysiologist who does lots of ablations. The guy who did mine does them every day. It’s a technical procedure where experience and technique really counts.
I had atrial ablation in 2014. The surgery and recovery went well.
A few have mentioned recovery, but not all of you: how long before you felt you were back to normal?
How did you feel during that time? Tired? Weak? For instance, when did you feel good enough to drive again?
(If you had other conditions that complicated recovery, as @SciFiSam apparently did, please note them.)
FYI, I’m 65, a little overweight, but otherwise in excellent health with no other conditions but this flutter.
It’s not so much that my other conditions complicated the recovery, it was that it meant that I couldn’t have a general anaesthetic, and really high doses of morphine do lead to a comedown. GA IME also leads to sort of brain-dead tiredness for a couple of days, but nothing really extreme - nothing you should worry about. However, I know a couple of other people who don’t react like that and were fine pretty much straight away. I think it’d be worth planning not to drive for a couple of days, but that’s all.
Driving yourself home after the op would definitely be a bad idea and was actually banned for me in the UK (not that I can drive anyway). By that I don’t mean it’s against the law (except in the sense that driving in a condition that’s unsafe to drive is generally illegal), and I’m sure the NHS couldn’t have forced me to stay in the hospital, but they advised against driving so strongly that any accident wouldn’t have been covered by insurance, so it’s effectively banned.
Thanks for the clarification. No question of driving myself home, my wife will do that. Just wondering when I might be up to driving in the next few days.
If I remember correctly, I took one day off from work and then was back to normal.
I should mention that my doctor was an eminent heart specialist at a famous Boston hospital. To Yosh99’s point–before I hooked up with him, I interviewed with a young doc who told me he had done “maybe 40” ablations. The eminent doc said he had done “thousands” of them.
Yes, to fix Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome.
Two, in fact. The first time, the tip of the catheter managed to get caught in the chordae tendineae (i.e., heart strings). The strings wrapped around the catheter, trapping it. They eventually had to cut off the end of the catheter, then take a larger, hollow one, and slide it up and over the first in order to push the strings past the end. Like having a rope wrapped a few times around a broom handle–pull on the handle and it makes the rope tighter. Slide your hand over it and the loop can be pushed off. They were prepping the OR for me in case that didn’t work.
I needed a second one to finish the job. It went smoothly.
Both times I stayed overnight due to the complications. No real problem aside from the discomfort of having to lie on my back for hours and some nausea from the general anesthesia.
I actually enjoyed the experience overall; at least initially I was only under local anesthesia and I watched the proceedings on an array of monitors. It was cool to see and feel the catheter threading its way up.
It’s been several years with no recurrence of the WPW-induced tachycardia. I was in my late 30s at the time, so recovery was easy. I took it a little easy for a week, but I’m not the type to do hard exercise anyway, so that wasn’t a problem. Driving was no problem. I had a good-sized bruise for a while.
Forgot to mention that I was around 39 at the time of the op. You’d think I’d remember, wouldn’t you? But one of the reasons I don’t is that is was so non-stressful.
It basically becomes a dinner-party story - that time I watched parts of my heart literally being burned away. A couple of tiny little connections disappeared as I watched, while my heart beat away on the screen, and the surgeons timed their movements with it. All I had to do was stay calm. It was fascinating.
That’s not under GA though obvs. I get the impression that GA is recommended more in the US than the UK.
I had what was diagnosed as paroxysmal atrial tachycardia all the way back to my high school days. By my mid-forties they were calling it Supra-ventricular tachycardia, but other than occurring more frequently and lasting longer, it was the same thing. After my second visit to the ER to stop one, I got a “radio frequency ablation” which I’m thinking is the same thing as your catheter ablation, since they went in through the femoral artery. I went in in the early morning, and my wife drove me home in the early afternoon. I slept for the rest of the day and well into the next day, after which everything was pretty much back to normal (except for restrictions on picking up anything over 5 lbs. for a couple of weeks.). I have not had a tachycardia in the 20 years since.
They used Valium for sedation, but I fell asleep almost immediately, and slept through the entire procedure. The only side effect I can remember was feeling emotionally disconnected for a couple of days after the procedure, which I have always attributed to the Valium, but who’s to say.
I was under general anaesthesia so for me getting over that was the biggest part of the recovery. I was told not to drive for 48 or 72 hours, can’t remember which. I had the procedure on a Thursday, came home on Friday, and was at the pub on Saturday.
I had a pair of ablations at the same time for atrial fibrillation ad atrial flutter. I was having bouts of absurd heart rates and my EP looked at my history of long QT, and pretty much said “I’ve scheduled you for next Wednesday, pandemic or not.” <eek!> The a-fib was bad enough, but that I was degrading into having flutter was just too much to put off. I don’t know how many years my EP has been in practice, but he said he does seven to ten ablations a week, so I’d safely assume he’s done several thousand.
The technology is fascinating - how they can thread a catheter up from your groin into your heart and zap the offending spots, then pull that out and put in another one that makes a small hole from one side to the other so they can freeze (cryoablation) a ring of tissue in the left atrium, all while the heart is flailing away at 160 beats per minute.
Overnight stay for observation, took the following day off from work, and back to normal rather quickly.
The only downside to all of this wizardry is the price - my insurance was billed close to $350,000.
Back home, feeling fine, and about to go to sleep.
Although the electrophysiologist thought I might have A-flutter and SVT, in the mapping process he couldn’t induce the SVT, so he only did one ablation. I was sedated but awake for the mapping, then out for the ablation.
Two hours for the procedure, then about an hour before I woke up, two hours on my back, an hour sitting up while they checked my BP, then home to my much relieved wife.
I’m feeling pretty good, and although it is after midnight, I’m not very sleepy. I think I’ll feel pretty much normal tomorrow, although I’ll still take it easy.
Thanks for sharing your experiences. Although I had a pretty good idea about the process, and wasn’t particularly nervous, it was good to have the confirmation of your posts.
Yay! Glad to hear it!
Ah got here late!
I had one attempted ablation about 25 years ago that had me under general anaesthetic for 6 hours (!), and was unsuccessful.
But, around 10 years after that, a doctor was shocked to discover I was still living with tachycardia (paroxymal fascicular tachycardia in my case; pretty unpleasant when I had the episodes). Apparently the operation had become routine in that time, and it was. Just 1.5 hours or so, and home next day I think.
One thing I’ll put in spoiler for the squeamish:
I woke up during the surgery. There was a little chest pain, but nothing too serious. But what was weird was, I was hooked up to a machine that was controlling my heartbeat – so they were just turning a dial or whatever and making my heart go faster or slower at will.
It occurs to me now that I never asked the doctors / surgeons about it afterwards, so it’s possible it was a dream, but it was one heck of a vivid dream if so.