Arrhythmia or irregular heartbeat is extremely common, generally harmless and tends to occur more often as we age. \u00a0However, \u00a0if these irregular heartbeats\u00a0become severe or continue for long enough, \u00a0they can deprive the body of oxygen leading to all kinds of complications – including death.<\/p>\n
One type of arrhythmia is called atrial fibrillation or A-Fib. \u00a0With A-Fib the upper chambers of the heart beat very rapidly and don’t pump the blood properly. \u00a0This can cause the blood to pool and clot. \u00a0If a clot breaks free it can lead to a stroke. \u00a0Patients with this condition are often prescribed Coumadin (aka Warfarin – a rat poison) to thin the blood and prevent clotting. \u00a0A daily baby aspirin is a safer alternative for some people.<\/p>\n
Here’s how my episode of A-Fib went. \u00a0I was lying in bed and noticed my heart was going too fast. \u00a0No symptoms other than that. \u00a0I got up and began feeling nauseous and light headed. \u00a0I barely made it back to bed without passing out. \u00a0I could sit up ok, although to move around I had to repeatedly walk\u00a0a few steps and sit down for a couple minutes\u00a0to avoid passing out. \u00a0I made it to the car and my wife drove me to the hospital. \u00a0There they applied an electrical shock, just like you see with heart attack victims on TV. \u00a0That got my heart back to a normal rhythm. \u00a0I was then scheduled for an ablation where a surgeon runs an electrode from the femoral artery near the groin to the heart and essentially burns out some of the electrical circuitry in the heart to prevent errant signals from causing A-Fib.<\/p>\n
That didn’t work out, so, while I was still on the table, they installed a pacemaker. \u00a0The pacemaker has programming that will sense A-Fib and immediately apply electrical charges to break the errant rhythm and get things quickly back to normal. That has been working ok for me for over five years now.<\/p>\n
Now, to the point of this story . . . \u00a0the December issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology<\/em> reported that Australian researchers had found that among people that had an ablation procedure, those that aggressively attacked their risk factors were 5 times more likely to be alive after five years with resolved heart rhythm issues. \u00a0Risk factors include: overweight, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high blood sugar, sleep apnea (another of my issues), smoking and drinking.<\/p>\n So, once again the best thing you can do for yourself is get into shape and getting outdoors is a great way to get there!<\/p>\n Has getting outdoors done anything for your heart issues? \u00a0Share your story by replying to this post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Arrhythmia or irregular heartbeat is extremely common, generally harmless and tends to occur more often as we age. However, if these irregular heartbeats become severe or continue for long enough, they can deprive the body of oxygen leading to all kinds of complications – including death. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":145,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-physical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/explore.globalcreations.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/explore.globalcreations.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/explore.globalcreations.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/explore.globalcreations.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/explore.globalcreations.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/explore.globalcreations.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":173,"href":"https:\/\/explore.globalcreations.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144\/revisions\/173"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/explore.globalcreations.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/explore.globalcreations.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/explore.globalcreations.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/explore.globalcreations.com\/theblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}