On Friday, I went in to have a catheter ablation performed to stop a problem I have with exercise-induced tachycardia. (Unfortunately, it was unsuccessful; they were unable to reproduce the arrythmia while I was in the cath lab.)
Anyhow, while I was being prepped, one of the things they did was to draw a small cross (in ballpoint pen ink) on the top of each of my feet. I was sort of bemused at the time, and didn’t stop to ask why.
Why did they do that? Is it to be able to quickly identify the pulse point (since each one is over a pulse point)?
I am ( or used to be) a suffer of tachycardia - they always told me there was no operation for it !!!
Boy of boy do i know the feeling of death on your shoulder when those triple speed heart beats kick in.
As i am unsure why or how they were operating it would be hard for me to guess … but everytime i have been hooked up to that love cold scarey ECG they always put two on my feet ankles ( and about 1000 else where)
I can only imagion it was a pulse pint because they sure as heck better not be cutting there.
But you would expect they would knwo where these pulse points are ??
To mark the point of your dorsalis pedis artery, to check for a pulse there, after the procedure. One complication of the catheterization would have been clot formation that could have cut off blood flow to your foot. They find the pulse point before the procedure, so they know where to look after.
Thanks, Qadgop. It was a small thing, but it did leave me scratching my head.
trader_of_shots: IANAD (obviously) — but I am becoming a fairly informed patient. There’s lots of reasons why you can be having tachycardia. Mine comes from a group of cells in or around the right ventricular outflow tract of the right ventricle that tend to go off on their own when exposed to adrenaline (and similar stuff) during and after exercise. This tends to happen more frequently in women. Upon monitoring this with an event monitor, they found that this was causing my ventricle to fire off as many as 11 to 13 contractions in a row out of sync with the rest of the heart, and I was ending up with heart rates in the 255 beats per minute range. My perception of this was having skipped beats — when I felt my pulse at my neck, I wasn’t able to feel the beats that the ventricle was kicking out, since there wouldn’t be a perceptible blood flow going out into the body with them. The success rate for treating RVOT with catheter ablation is roughly 80-90%. I, unfortunately, ended up in the 10% group.
Another common cause is supraventricular tachycardia, or SVT. This is where part of the atrium gets a repeat signal of the command to beat, and fires off extra atrial contractions. Success rates for treating SVT with radiofrequency ablation are in excess of 95%. (These are much easier to induce in the cath lab.)
Radiofrequency catheter ablation is a relatively new procedure. It has been around for just the past 10 years or so. Because it can have such high success rates, though, it has become the front line in treating several types of tachycardia.
Although I didn’t get the actual ablation done (where they burn out the offending parts of your heart with radiofrequency waves), the rest of the procedure was a piece of cake. It was not particularly painful or stressful, and I feel fully recovered less than 48 hours later.
So, if I were you, I would google “catheter ablation” and read up on it, and consult with your doctor to see if the type of tachycardia you have is treatable that way.
what ywalker said. Educate yourself, talk to your doc. It’s a pretty safe and helpful procedure. The catheter ablation, that is. also educating yourself.