Hi,
Side Story: I found out I had AFib in April 2021. Following the pandemic, I wanted to get back into the gym, so I asked my doctor if she thought I was healthy enough to keep up that level of activity. I had been working out three days a week before that. She recommended that I take a treadmill test. I was a runner for years, and I’d had a treadmill test about a decade before, so I was fairly sure I would do all right.
Before they put you through your paces, they plug electrodes onto your chest so they can monitor you throughout the test. The technician had finished plugging me up and had turned on her EKG machine. I was sitting in a chair, waiting for her to tell me to get on the treadmill, when she said, “Just wait there, I’ll be back in a minute.” She came back a couple of minutes later with my doctor in tow. My doctor asked me if I felt all right. I said I felt fine. She told me my heart rate was 160 beats per minute (BPM), and I needed to go to the emergency room, NOW.
I actually did feel fine, so I called Minay, told her what was going on, and drove myself to the hospital (about four miles up the freeway from my clinic). My doctor had called ahead and told them to expect me. They rushed me into a room and hooked me up to another EKG machine. The nurse confirmed that I was at about 150 BPM then. I honestly couldn’t feel it. For the next couple of hours I was propped up in an emergency room bed, unable to see the monitors (they were behind me), but Minay arrived fairly quickly and updated me while my heart rate slowly dropped back down into the 90 BPM range. I never felt bad, or dizzy, or out of breath. I apparently have asymptomatic AFib. I can’t tell when my heart beats faster (or more slowly for that matter).
My doctor made an appointment with a cardiologist (who is now my main heart doctor). He confirmed (after yet another EKG) that I had AFib, and explained what it is, and said that the biggest concern with AFib is that it can cause strokes (and he explained about the left atrial appendage (LAA) and possibility of the blood clotting, etc.). He put me on Eliquis, and I’ve been taking 5 mg twice a day for the last 4 1/2 years (and still am as of this writing).
Eliquis is one of those medications that most people call blood thinners, even though they don’t actually make your blood thinner (or increase the level of plasma in your bloodstream or anything like that). Eliquis is an anticoagulant. It keeps your blood from clotting so quickly. In AFib, with blood pooling in the LAA, something like Eliquis is necessary.
I could continue on the Eliquis for years, but the plan is to get me off of it (which the ablation and the Watchman should let me do) it will be much better for me physically. All anti-coagulants have some drawbacks. I can bruise more easily, and if I ever get a serious cut it will be harder to stop the bleeding. Little cuts, scrapes, etc., aren’t that big a deal. Holding down a tissue on a small cut or scrape for a minute or two usually does the trick. Eliquis is also very expensive Fortunately, my insurance covers most of that, but I still end up spending an extra thousand dollars or so a year for it. I have already (at my cardiologist’s suggestion) cut my amiodarone dose in half, and will be finished with them by year’s end. Beginning on December 22nd I will begin taking a half dose of Eliquis, with the aim of stopping it altogether sometime next spring. At that point I will just take a single aspirin a day.
I will be glad to be done with both of them.
The next post is about eye doctors and checkups, another task we’ve been putting off.
See you then,
Michael
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