Today has been an eventful day. I was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation the beginning of the covid pandemic. After a number of trips to A&E I was offered a place on a clinical trial compering ablation to a placebo. An ablation is where a catheter is inserted into a vein in the groin and passed up into the heart. Them the cells causing the heart to misfire are then killed by freezing. The treatment has been used for a number of years but some doctors think there may be a strong placebo effect. I decided to volunteer for the trial because I think it's important to help medical science to advance and it also meant I would got to the top of the waiting list if it turned out that I had had the placebo.
I had the operation in March, but found out at the end of September that I had the been given the placebo procedure. So today I had the real ablation.
The procedure, at least in the UK, is done under sedation and local anesthetic. This makes the recovery time much quicker. The first one I had, the placebo one, was a walk in the park however the real one wasn't as pleasant. The worst part was when they were identifying which cells were causing the problem. I was drugged up to my eyeballs with morphine and diazepam, but this part of the procedure was unpleasant although it didn't last long.
So now I'm in the recovery room. The nurse has been trying to gradually sit me up however the wound bled a lot! So I will be here until they are certain it's not likely to bleed.
Hopefully this will mean my heart will settle down now this is done and I will be able to do more without my heart beating fast and erratically.
