Posted , 3 users are following.
My eposides are multiple times daily. It went from once in a blue moon 20 years ago to near hourly episodes in the past 6 months. Everything from being hungry to over eating, being sad, angry, surprised, happy, tired, anything triggers it. Waiting for appt with EP in two weeks. Has anyone else experienced this? What were your treatments? If ablation, did it take?
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chadcf Guest
Posted
Mine were pretty rare until about 6 months after ablation, when I started having episodes roughly every 2 weeks for 2-3 days in a row. It was a strange pattern...Over the following months it went to weekly episodes, up to about 3 times a week. At that point we increased me metoprolol dose to 200mg, and since then (about 3 months ago) I've had no more episodes.
Mine were / are triggered by some of the things you mention. Eating a big meal does it, as did bending over and straining (tie shoes, bending over to wash lower parts of car, etc). Also walking the dog up a hill, and hot showers. Lots of fun things.
So far I'm hanging steady with the metoprolol and feeling fine. My EP says the next step would probably be flecainide to try and control it if the metoprolol stops doing the job, and suggests only trying another ablation as a last resort. But I'm unfortunately (for me, luckily for you) a rare case.
Guest chadcf
Posted
That's too bad it didnt take. Sounds like ablation made it worse or was it heading that way? Mine seem to be getting worse as time progresses. It got better for a week after I quit smoking and drinking coffee but seems to be getting worse again. Watch it all stops when I see the doctor! Haha! It always seems to work that way for me! At any rate best of luck to you. Thank you for sharing.
chadcf Guest
Posted
Yeah it's hard to say. My EP said the ablation could have made it worse, scar tissue could have formed altering electrical flow making it slightly easier to get into the rhythm, or they could have just not gotten it good enough, or a new spot could have popped up. Who knows! I can say luckily my episodes terminate pretty quickly if I just sit or lay down for 5 minutes so it's reasonably easy to live with. Also in my experience caffeine has no impact at all, I experimented with it plenty and found caffeine intake vs no caffeine intake makes no difference. I found some studies that backed this up too, but everyone is unique. Quitting smoking is probably a great idea though.
I always caution people not to be discouraged based on my experience though, my doctor said I'm like a 5% case and have one of the rarer types of SVT. The vast majority of people have an experience like my ex wife who went in for an ablation, found an extra pathway in no time, zapped it and cured for good. Even though mine didn't take I'm still glad I tried and would be willing to try again should medication not do the job.