Hey Jay,
Good to hear from you! What date will you be in Austin next month?
You've done really well on this index go around, especially considering your long-term extensive AFIB prior to your index ablation. As we discussed before the ablation, I was pretty darn sure you would need a two part solution for long term freedom, and it seemed a near certainty when I saw your ablation report was indeed very similar to my own in terms of total duration of the ablation and amount of work required being just a handful of minutes shy of my own very extensive 117 minutes of RF burn time required in my index procedure 9 years ago.
This next visit to Austin will very likely be a walk in the park with, as you suspect, the main trigger area needing to be addressed likely being a spot or two between the CS and LAA in order to finish buttoning down these two more challenging frontier structures in the left and right atria that are so intimidatory connected electrically and that present a 30% to 40% chanced of needing that a touch up procedure to long term. It's just not always possibly to achieve durable isolation of those two structures in a single procedure.
As we get older too, well into our 'golden years', and have had issues with AFIB for a long while, the odds of needing a second visit to the maestros EP Lab increase. My philosophy is if you are going to need a touch up anyway, might as well get it done sooner rather than later :-).
Seed me a message or give me a ring on what date you are going to be in Austin as I'll be there the first weekend in March for the International Symposium on the Left Atrial Appendage conference which this year is better my held in Austin. Would be great if the dates overlap so we cold rendezvous!
Take care Buddy!
Shannon