![]() I asked my friend’s EP, “If you were to get an ablation for afib in the greater Los Angeles area who would you choose?” He came back with one name, no equivocating, a cardiologist at UCLA Health, but not the one I’d chosen through my Googling. ![]() A good friend of mine – a lifelong high-caliber runner turned cyclist – had a successful ablation performed in another state. UCLA Health (which includes UCLA Medical Center) has a cardiology department and I thought I’d found my electrician, and this cardiac specialty is called an electrophysiologist (EP). I found my doctor just through working the internet, looking for likely medical groups that I considered worthy candidates, and asking the doctors who I trusted for recommendations.Ĭardiologists are either plumbers or electricians and a cardiology medical group will contain both specialties. I then decided to begin the long process toward getting an ablation, which began with a search for the right doctor who’d perform the procedure. My longest stretch in afib was about 5 days. Afib is not life threatening it’s just very annoying and a great inconvenience unless your daily life consists of sleeping and the TV.Īt age-64 my afib got more frequent and each episode lasted longer. But try to run, or walk up stairs, and you feel as if you’re performing this act at 18,000 feet above sea level. Being in afib is no problem if you’re sitting, laying, doing nothing in particular. Mind, that walk wasn’t 100 percent comfortable. Usually I overnighted in afib, arose, went outside for a gentle morning effort – such as a brisk dog walk for a mile or two – and my heart found its sinus rhythm before I returned home. Over the next 15 years I would fall into afib for several hours, or a day it only happened once or twice a year I would always cardiovert on my own and I just accepted this as a way of life. My heart just decided to beat normally again on its own. I “cardioverted” naturally, which is to say I did not get zapped back into sinus rhythm nor take anti-arrhythmic drugs. I pretty much knew what was going on inside me as I drove myself to the emergency room. My first introduction to afib was at age-50, when I spent about 40 hours out of sinus rhythm (which is the term for a normal heart rhythm). It’s those middle years – when we’re in our 50s, plus or minus – that afib is a familiar diagnosis for us. Men in particular continue to outpace non-athletes in afib incidence until later in life, when the ravages of an unhealthful life cause the general population’s rate of afib to catch up. The more we do it and the better we do it the more likely afib awaits us. “Among male participants of a 90 km cross-country skiing event, a faster finishing time and a high number of completed races were associated with higher risk of arrhythmias.” That’s a good snapshot. The Harder they come, the harder they fall, one and allįifty-two thousand Swedish nordic skiers competing in the Vasaloppet were studied years after they raced (it took about 10 editions of the race to accumulate that number of skiers). It’s a U-shaped curve and when you get to the extreme edge of endurance effort the incidence of afib begins to rise sharply. Your chance of descending into afib actually goes down with moderate exercise, and more exercise further lowers your risk… until you start exercising like we do. There have been to my knowledge 3 meta-analyses that report up to a 5-fold increase in afib for lifelong ardent endurance athletes compared to the general population. Our cohort – lifelong hard charging endurance athletes – have an exaggerated incidence of afib. Not wanting to perform an end zone dance prematurely I thought I’d wait until I was completely recovered from the procedure and that’s why I’m writing about this now. ![]() I’m been in sinus rhythm (normal heart rhythm) pretty much continuously since the procedure. About 8 months ago I got an ablation for atrial fibrillation (afib for short). ![]()
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