Hi guys,
As mentioned in the afibbers forum, I was diagnosed about 5 months ago, had an ablation 12 days ago and I'm currently recovering at home before (most prob) returning to work next week.
Apart from the afib, it's been a fairly stressful year all-round, all told. I lost my father just over a week on from my afib diagnosis and thus began perhaps the worst few months of my life up until this point. I'll spare you all the sob story but a succession of panic attacks, led to fairly regular anxiety symptoms and I now find myself in the wonderful position of adding high blood pressure to the lists of ailments.
It's fairly unusual for me because, prior to this year, I'd only ever been to A&E (ER) once in my life. Rarely visited my general practitioner and considered myself a fairly fit, healthy person. Sure, I liked a drink or 6 once a week and the odd takeaway pizza but I've always been fairly slim and quite fit. All of this combined, with the ablation being the icing on the cake, has laid me quite low and I believe the stress has primarily caused the high blood pressure. That being said, I'm hoping that it can be brought back under control with medication and just generally de-stressing myself over the next couple of months. As of about 6-7 weeks ago, my GP first noticed it was too high and again last week. Since then, I've been monitoring it myself and it's regularly 130-40/90-100. Far too high for somebody that has just turned 36.
As I said, I'm hoping to be started on meds later this week when I have myself checked out again by the consultant nurse at my local practitioner's surgery.
In the meantime, I was hoping to get some clarification from any of you that may also have suffered/currently do from high blood pressure. Kind of running parallel to the first time my doctor noticed it was high I've been having slight visual issues (kind of blurry, just not right), along with a general 'fuzzy' feeling in my head, find it a little difficult to concentrate at times. I've also suffered a bit with slight pressure in my ears, along with an occasional pounding in my ears and the back of my neck. I've had some information about high bp symptoms and I seem to tick most of the boxes but wanted to see if you had any first-hand experiences of these kinds of things as they're fairly new to me?
Thanks in advance, all.
David
