Bisoprolol buddies

HI everyone, well i have tried stopping my Bisoprolol as i just can't cope with this exhaustion all the time, its causing huge arguments in my household as no one seems to understand or bother that i feel so ill all the time, im still expected to carry on as normal and do everything i used to do before i had cancer, and ive just had enough now, so ive stopped them!!!!! And boy do i feel ill......... my heart is going from 40bpm to 130bpm, i'm having hundreds of missed beats and i have chest pain, ive tried to do it, but ive become almost permanently disabled as i can't breathe, so after a week i have had to restart it. Ive seen my new g.p. who has now split the dose, 2.5 mg in the morning and 5mg in the evening, today is the first day of this so i'm giving it a try, but today i had the chest pain and missed beats for hours, it was awful, so don't know why this happened, maybe the heat!

Ive contacted my old cardiologist and asked for full copies of my test results, but as per normal she is refusing so far, she has never ever been helpful, nor interested in my health, and i'm pleased to say that i have now received a letter from my new hospital asking me to go and see my new consultant on 2nd August....horayyyyyyyyyy lol. I pray to God he/she is better than my last one.

What i hate is the lack of empathy and explanations, when i went up to the London Heart hospital in December to have a scan of my heart, it took almost 2 hours longer than it should of, the dr there spoke to me about my Pulmonary stenosis, he said i need to see someone about it and to ask my cardiologist to refer me when i see her next, but she just wrote to me saying everything was fine, i spoke to her and said the dr said i need to see someone about my pulmonary stenosis and she said i was not to worry?? I'm so confused with all this, all she has wrote is that everything was normal..... so what does that mean, that i no longer have heart problems.....because my new g.p. told me only yesterday that my heart does not beat in sync, that maybe why i feel so breathless, and that i have a slightly leaking heart valve and that i still have my pulmonary stenosis, so how does that make 'every thing normal' then.... im bloody well cheesed off with all this and need some answer, i pray this new cadiologist is not as ignorant as my last one. xx

I'd had enough of all the miserable side effects so i decided to reduce my dose from 5mg to 2.5mg. What a difference. I feel i have a life! Backache has almost disappeared,no foggy head as if i hadn't slept,no tingling in my arm and hands, no cold feet,brain working more efficiently(i can do figures more easily),legs not shaky and i can walk(no feeling that they are about to collapse) and not a feeling of depression! BRILLIANT.

However, i made an appointment and saw a new GP in our practice this am. The results of my 24 hr monitor (whilst on 5 mg), showed my pulse rate to be 90 to 150 bpm. Rec that my beta blocker could be upto 7.5mg.I explained to her that i had reduced my beta blocker and the improvements to my well being. I also had monitored my blood oxygen levels and pulse using a digital kit that i bought. The readings for the oxygen was excellent and my pulse at its highest was 110 bpm.

My doc stills wants me to up the dose to 5mg! I am so reluctant to do it .When asked about alternatives to bisoprolol she said that this was the best drug to use.No alternative was suggested but she asked me if i would like a referral to cardiology dept.

I have no other choice but to have it checked out again. My family say i should up the dose to 5mg cos thats what my doc says but i don't want to have those rotten side effects back again and live like a zombie.

Has anyone here reduced their intake of bisoprolol? Did you doc approve or did he/she suggest it?

Hi there Elizabeth and co! Yes indeed I tried reducing the dose of BISOPROLOL from 10mg - which I believe is the maximum - to 5mg and that was with my GP's blessing ....I guess he got fed up with my whining on about the stuff...LOL Anyway - within a week or so - although feeling tons better in myself - I was having prolonged episodes of Atrial Fibrilation that had me reduced to a jelly ....and when I was finally forced to phone the surgery - I was more or less told to go back to the original dose.

I did of course and slowly recovered - BUT also lost all my "get up and go" again......grrrr!!

My first neurologist (ie Mr Nasty!!) told me I had obviously had a mini stroke and I found out afterwards that he had made this judgement as a result of the smal degree of residual palsy down one side of my face - which I told him was due to a Bell's Palsy I had in 1986.....but he obviously ignored the info.

Happily I have since seen a Mr Nice-guy Neurologist at the stroke unit and he has told me that - once I have a brain scan done he thinks it will confirm that I have VP - which is "Vascuar Parkinsonism" - which has nothing to do with PD - Parkinsons Disease but is a rare form of "Lower Limb Parkinsonism" by which it is also called.

He is also not convinced that the Bisorolol is to blame but at least is willing to speak to my GP about changing me off it to something else ......as you can imagine - I can hardly wait!!!

Everybody seems to think that there is no equivalent drug that has the specific action required for PAF ....I can hardly believe that the drug companies have allowed that to happen....!!!

When and if I find an alternative - I will be right back, Folks!!!

Thank you for your quick reply. I have read all sorts of stuff on AF. There are other drugs that can be used -- read STOP A/F. Its an American site and is very informative especially topic area "stuck in middle with a/f"----think thats what it was called!

My doc is like yours--bisoprolol she reckons is the only one to use. I said that people seem to have different tolerance levels-not an exact science cos we are all different in our reactions to medication. No joy though. She still would only recommend the 5 mg dose.

I feel so good now i don't want to experience those dreadful side effects again. My AF I think is permanent--not sure cos my pulse rate varies during the day but i always have an anxious feeling in my chest. Ive no pain,and not breathless. Wish I could get the answer to my medical problem balanced with life.

My family are adamant that i Return to 5mg! Back to HELL!

STOP AF = Sustained Treatment of Paroxysmal Atrial Fibrillation

and sadly they hardly ever do Cardiac CryoAblation in the UK

It certainly has the benefit of stopping the AF of course and according to the literture both in the USA and Canada - it shows superiority over any of the current anti-arrhythmic drugs used over here.

I was offered such treatment but only if I went to Canada - where my son is a phyisician...... Hopefully I can beat the system here before I need to go "over the Pond" - at my age - not an option really - LOL

Hi Everyone, well i finally went to my appointment with my new Cardiologist last Friday, i could not wait. They were running over 2 hours late but i sat patiently in a heat wave in an attic waiting room just dripping with sweat. I finally got called and to my dismay realised they had just shoved me in to see a locum, to say i was bloody well fed up is an understatement, she knew nothing about my case at all, she had not one single answer to the 9 questions i had wrote down to ask her, she could not get me out of the room quick enough as they had run into their lunch breaks, and then she had the flaming cheek to say my symptoms are down to worry and anxiety!!!!! I could have screamed at her, i have had it now, sick to the back teeth of all of this messing me about.

It was my very first appointment at my new hospital, people always see the high up consultant on their first appointment.. I could have sat and cried, i had so much i needed answering.

She did send me for an echo, which i have now had done.... the dr doing the echo said i now don't have heart failure!! Talk about confused..... well i did have grade 2 heart failure at christmas, now its gone, im happy about this but unsure whether to believe it..... my symptoms get so bad, the chest pain hurts, and i get up to 9,000 missed beats a day, but they have become so painful, they never used to be this painful, they stop me doing everyday things, so if i don't have heart failure, why do i have all these symptoms.

I feel like none of them want to know, they can't be bothered to look into it as its not a huge problem...but it affects my life big time. The cardiologist did say my heart was too fast, and i told her that i had now taken myself off of the Bisoprolol as i'm sick of the side effects....she went on to say the bisoprolol don't cause side effects and none of the symptoms i have are down to the tablets!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! My God what planet is she on...... She then said i need to go to a higher dose of the bisoprolol, from 7.5mg to 10mg a day, oh my God, i cant cope with the dose i was on, talk about making it higher......

I said to her, if i don't have heart failure, why am i on heat failure tablets, and such a high dose as well. All she could say is something is making your heart race and i don't think its to do with your heart, i think its something else making it race. I explained that the minute i stop the bisoprolol i become really disabled as i can't breathe, the heart is so fast it can't slow down and it misses so many beats i start to pass out, but she could not answer this as to the reason why this is???

I am fed up to the back teeth with it all, if i no longer have heart failure why do i feel so bad. The person doing my echo did say i still have a bulging of the left ventrical, at the bottom of the ventrical it is bulging but his attitude was ' don't worry about it'.

sick of it all now, Honeybea xx

Honeybea i feel so sympathetic to how you feel--so sorry that you are having such a bad time. Its sofrustrating not to be able to find out the truth. Problem is that not all docs or specialists are that good. After reading so much stuff online,although time consuming;i am having serious worries about my GP.

I believe she has followed protocol and the best solution for AF is bisoprolol 5mg of it. She would not budge to give me any other medication. She follows the text book;no empathy with the state of my morale or empathy with any of the side effects.She has passed me up the line--hospital cardiologist. My old doc would have treated me better and taken on more responsibility for my health. I wonder if this is the new way of delivering healthcare!

Ive spent most of the day trying to find out if I can reduce this drug to 2.5mg cos My pulse is 86bpm and o2 levels in blood are 97% and I feel so much better. Well I did until I start reading stuff which fogs up my decisions. I have thought to subscribe to doc online and ask questions from a profesional cardiologist.

Has anyone subscribed to this and if so was it useful. I can't work out how much it would cost.

Great if this drug works for you but its hell for me! I can't grasp how my 4 hr monitor recorded 94bpm to 150bpm whilst i was taking 5mg and its supposed to lower the heart rate. Wish now I'd worked harderand trained to be a doc!!!! All the best to fellow sufferers-you are definitely not alone.

Hi bisoprolol ladies and gents,

I suffer with the same things as most of you I think, constant flipping tiredness! I work as a carer and do 14 hour shifts so its not ideal to be shattered!

I'm only 25 and I feel a lot older! All this started when I was 16 and I started fainting and having a rapid heartbeat although it took 8 years for the doctors to try and find out what was wrong with me after saying it was down to hormones for a long time! However, they then did a 24 hour ECG (picked up nothing but it never does play up when they ask it to perform!), so after me moaning a bit more they did a week long one and a bp monitor, the ecg showed that my heart rate was up to over 200 and my bp was 70/40 (can not understand why I am now on meds for high blood pressure but they don't ever seem to answer that!)

I've been diagnosed with SVT and started off on verapamil, went flying through the doses for that so they put me on bisoprolol, in April I also went for heart ablation surgery to attempt to fix the issue – it didn't work! They spent two hours to say that the problem is in an inaccessible area.

So now, Ive just gone up from 5mg to 7.5 of bisoprolol, starting the new dosage tomorrow, although my doctors given me 3x 2.5 …. Do I take them all at the same time or throughout the day?!

Keep happy and awake (if possible!) people,

Charlotte

Hi Charlotte......I think that you are supposed to take the full does all at once and in particular at the same time each day.Some of us have been trying to split the dose eg 5mg twice a day in an attempt to ease the side effects - but it didn't help me at least - but then if the drug is "slow release" it wouldn't make any difference oviouslyl

So the short answer to your query is - take it all at once - unless your prescription states otherwise .

You can always check with your pharmacist.....OK?

Good luck and I hope they finally manage to sort out your problem Charlotte...it sure sounds debilitating - we can all sympathise on here....not so LOL.....

Yours aye

Alz,

Thank you for your quick reply! Ive taken all 3 of them this morning and so far so good, although as usual on a saturday I have spent most of the day asleep!

Hopefully the new dosage will sort this all out!

Charlotte

Hope it works for you. Bisoprolol 5mgs,makes me tired and i needed more sleep. The fatique lasts most of the day and i feel as though i'm walking in treacle. Much better now ive dropped the dose to 2.5mg. Read my other posts. Much better quality to my life but i may be taking a huge risk with my life! I am at low risk with my AF and have 2% more chance of a stroke or heart attack. Don't know how they have worked this out.! I wish i could find a conclusive answer or at least a doc who understands how i feel. E!ach one of us is different.

Take care.

Why on earth do we let our doctors dictate what is best for us , sure sounds like this medications is more harmful and useful...Tomorrow to the dr I go to tell him that my life is very important to me , and sleeping it is not in my agenda of the day, and sore legs and feet..Nope , to the natural products I go ,stopping everything that I know is putting weight on, feeling lousy and tired all of the times, it is my life and natural products as not killed anyone that I know off, I will continue my vitamins , Omega 3 and the rest ,well no more to see if in a month or so I still feel the same which I have my doubt, I need to detox myself fr all of those medications to start fresh......

I feel like but my Heart is good

Hello. I have been given Bisoprolol 2.5 as I have AF. When I was first diagnosed with this I did not accept

medication as I thought it was down to the stress of moving house and that my symptoms would improve.

Unfortunately they did not. I have only been on the tablets for 12 days but feel light headed, tired and worst

of all bloated. I am so uncomfortable. I mentioned it to the doctor who dismissed that it could possibly the

Bisoprolol but as this is the only change made in my diet I cannot see what else it could be. The thought of

being bloated forever and gaining weight , to me, is worse than the palpitations. Does anyone else suffer this side effect?

Hi Joy44,

I have never had the bloated feeling, in fact the doctors have increased my dosage and now I hardly ever feel hungry! Although at night I am!

It may take a while for your symptoms to go away though, give it some time.

Hope you feel better soon

Charlotte