is there a test to confirm recovery from afib?

medowherman@gmail.com

'My' cardiologist told me that afib will return to me - it's just a matter of time. Could be weeks or 20 years but it will return. Then again he also told me that he didn't think cardio-version would get me into normal SR but it did - after the second try and me having obtained alternative advise as well as following it.
Suppose recovery is when you keep your heart in normal sinus rhythm as seen on screen?

Herman.
The short answer has to be No. The usual way of looking at this is if you get further episodes of the Afib. If you do still get the occasional episode then this would be called paroxysmal AF (or sometimes lone AF if you are otherwise well). In either case there is an increased risk of stroke. So if you are a medium or high risk for stroke (measured by CHADS-VASc score >0) then you should be taking an anticoagulant. You can Google all this.
Herbert

An ECG can tell if you are in afib or normal rhythm. Not sure what you mean by recovery. If you convert from afib to normal rhythm, then the question is will you stay in rhythm or have other afib episodes.

The Kardia device <[www.amazon.com] is an ECG device for use at home. It connects to an app on a smartphone and can detect afib. The app now requires a $10/month subscription to save ECG's. I've owned this since 2014 and it works well.

George

No, Joe, now that you have a record of having had afib, nearly any untoward medical event will be blamed on the afib. Or at least that is how things have been with me. If i so much as stub my toe, any medic i come across blames the afib, no matter how long ago i claim to have had the last afib episode. All think it was the fault of the afib. One doctor i went to for some years, altho female, grey haired and seemingly sensible, would every time i saw her, listen to my heart with this VERY CONCERNED expression on, then announce portentously that i was not in afib. When my reply was " yes, that's right, i already know that", very briefly an irritated expression would cross her face,as though i had said something rude. Most obviously she felt she had given me important information and i had rejected it.

And indeed i was wrong to make her feel that way, as i have lately found out. In march or april of 2015, I got pneumonia. At an emergency room a couple of small towns over, they gave me a prescription of antibiotic and sent me home with the usual instructions about liquid intake and finish up the whole prescription even if i started to feel better.

About halfway thru the prescription i suddenly felt, not better, but WORSE, much worse. I somehow promoted a ride back to the same emergency room and told them about how suddenly things had taken a turn for the much, much worse, and they said that all that was well explained by my having pneumonia. At no time did anybody mention afib to me, and fool that i am and sick as i was, i thought i might have finally escaped that label.

I did not think of afib at all. In retrospect of course what ailed me was that after having pneumonia for a week or so, my laboring heart had gone into afib, but i was too sick to think clearly. I thought i was very, very slow getting over the pneumonia. I never thought of the afib other than to be glad i had escaped it at last. Every medic i saw for anything i complained to that the pneumonia had never gone away. Every one of them launched into a very simplified explanation about as we get older we do not heal up as fast as we used to do when we were younger. Most of them did not even wear a stethoscope. I have got shoes older than most of these folks, but it is always "we" this and "we" that.

An elderly doctor with a kindly manner - nearest to marcus welby they could muster is my guess - whom i had never seen before - prescribed a week's worth of codeine pills and told me that might make me feel better but he had nothing else to offer. I got involved in explaining that after it was gone i would then have a small, but acutely uncomfortable, opiate habit. He looked very doubtful and expressed the usual opinion among medics that prescribed opiates taken as directed would not produce a habit. I got so caught up in evangelism about that's-not-true, that it did so produce a habit, that anything more than 2 day's regular intake would have me twitching uncontrollably. I remember how uncomfortably he agreed that 1 day on and one day off "might" prevent that. but of course he could not guarantee that would happen.

In retrospect i guess my capacity for denial had caught up with me at last. I bitched a lot to my doctor for the next few months about getting out of breath walking no further than to the woodshed door and back to let the cat in. My doctor eventually referred me to a pulmonologist, a heavyset older woman maybe in her 60's. She certainly did wear a stethoscope, and she made a very simple.easy request. She showed me the short corridor outside her office and asked me to walk to the end of it, and then walk back to her. She listened first with the stethoscope and mentioned that she thought i might be in afib. I, blithe in my self deception, thought "pulmonologist, not an EP, ". and went for the short walk. She listened again when i dropped into the chair in her office,panting like the proverbial long distance runner, but she clearly did not like what she heard. I promised to see my heart doctor soonest and get to the bottom of whatever was wrong.

I know better, but...... this heart doctor is a cardiologist and not an EP. He is the head of the cardiology department at yet another small local hospital. Local renown, very nice man, took care of one of my friends and she recommended him. I DO know better but thought this one would be different. Good appearance, very handsome man, liked him immediately. No fool like an old fool.

In his office i asked him, in an as calm a voice tone as i could muster, why he had not mentioned the afib to me so i could get it cardioverted while it was still cardiovertible, before my heart got too used to afibbing to go back to NSR . He immediately turned in my records to written accounts of the pneumonia, forwarded to him from the neighboring ER, and showed me where someone there had made a note of the afib,and of course they have you sign that form right away that says they told you everything you need to know.

He said essentially that if i had not got it cardioverted by the time they sent him those records, it looked like it would not be effective at that late date so he said nothing about it. He mentioned that i had been diagnosed as having a faulty memory subsequent to the stroke in 2009, so i must have forgotten being told that, he said.

Now that is the same stroke that was blamed on the afib, even though at the time of the stroke the last afib event had been during the october just preceeding that stroke. From october to april seems to me to be 6 going on 7 months. Once more, if my heart had produced a clot when i had that last afib event, could that clot have been still swirling around and dropping off little pieces to jam up some small vessel in my brain at least 5 months later? Opinions, anybody?

I must have been having silent afib , i hope you will not say? Then i must not be the same woman who was criticized for a nervous habit of checking my pulse at the wrist every few moments just to be sure i was not in afib. That habit would have revealed any irregularity pretty soon, i do think. I am not so simple that i would just not have noticed afib. I can notice it now anyway. It is most prominent upon exertion of course and equally of course that is a time when i can barely catch breath enough to collapse in a seat, much less focus on detecting pulse beats.

With some difficulty i have forced my O2 short self to make measurements. Am i getting regular tediously similar repetitions or wildly dissimilar sequences seldom repeated? The latter? Well, genius, what is that called? As i get more oxygenated my language comes back and i can say afib. But if i relax someplace my heartrate and breathing will eventually calm and then it takes a longer time to notice irregularities.

So is it even useful to think this development is anybody's fault? What if it was, can i get a reset back to before it happened? I don't think so.

Anybody with thoughts on how to proceed, speak up please, what harm could it do?

PeggyM

Dear Peggy, I don’t have any advice or help to offer I’m afraid, but not having heard from you for a while I just wanted to tell you how delighted I am that you are still posting angry, funny and pertinent messages on the board. Long may it continue! Do keep on fighting and believing in your own intelligence!

Gill

Nice to hear from you Peggy:

could that clot have been still swirling around and dropping off little pieces to jam up some small vessel in my brain at least 5 months later? Opinions, anybody?

No, after about 3 weeks, a Clot is absorbed into the surrounding Blood Vessel Wall. No you did not have a Stroke resulting from AFIB an episode 5 months prior.

He said essentially that if i had not got it cardioverted by the time they sent him those records, it looked like it would not be effective at that late date so he said nothing about it.

Generally speaking, There is no certain time-frame that a Cardioversion has to be done by for it to work, unless very-long term AFIB has been present. It used to be said that if someone was in AFIB continously for more than a year, then it was not worth trying to Cardiovert out of it. The longer you are in AFIB, the less likely that you would be able to Cardiovert in NSR, and have it last very long. I was in AFIB for more than a year, and I converted back into NSR, but I had to get 7 Cardioversions over the next 6 months for my NSR to last. Then it lasted for 18 months, later I had to get more Cardioversions to stay in NSR. I never got any Ablations.

So is it even useful to think this development is anybody's fault? What if it was, can i get a reset back to before it happened? I don't think so.

I think your Doctors both at the ER Room and your own Dr. should have told you that you were in AFIB. They are at fault, for many reasons, one obviously, that you need to know to adjust your Medications, especially Anti-Coagulants. Every time I have an EKG, I ask the the technician what did it show, can I see it? Sometimes they don't show it to me though. If so, then I make the Dr. show it to me. That way they your sure of what the EKG said.

Peggy, from your Post, are you saying you think you have been in AFIB since April of 2015 when you had the Pneumonia? Or have you possibly been in and out of AFIB during this time?

Just based on what I know of your situation, since you were Self-Converting before all of this, it seems to me they should have tried at least once to Cardiovert you. How did your Dr. know that you were in continuous AFIB, and not going in and out of it? No way he could know that, unless you had told him you were in continuous AFIB.

Hello, dear Peggy! I'm so sorry to read your frustrating saga of events... but as Gill comments, I, too, am happy to see you posting in your typical, witty style. Question.... are you taking either a prescription for anticoagulant... or using natural aids to help prevent clot formation?

Jackie