snake a camera to your heart
Wednesday, 15 November 2006 00:02![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
melayneseahawkSaw the cardiologist at the Washington Hospital Center today talked about the cardiac ablation, got some numbers. I'm reminded, once again, why I hate being broken.
SVT is caused by a secondary electical circuit existing the heart when there should only be one. An abnormal beat, which are single pulses that have something funky about them and exist even in normal hearts, can trigger a re-entry circuit in one or more chambers of the heart, creating a tachycardia (elevated heartrate).
There's a 60% chance that my SVT is AV nodal re-entrant tachycardia: the AV node has two currents rather than one, and periodically a feedback loop starts up in the node. One in six people has two currents in their AV node, but the currents are usually similar enough that they don't cause trouble. When they're different, the cause tachycardia. To fix this, they zap the AV node, burning out one of the circuits and leaving the other intact.
There's a 30% chance that it's caused by an accessory pathway: an extra node, often on the outer wall of the left atrium, that has it's own current, and can create a feedback loop in the left atrium and ventricle. This is treated by running a catheter from the right atrium to the left and then zapping the extra node out of existence.
There's a 10% chance it's something else from a list of four or five other things.
With the accessory pathway, there's a tiny chance they could perforate the walls of the heart when they're going through, and that would be really, really bad. But that almost never happens.
With the AV nodal re-entrant tachycardia, there's a 1% chance they could zap the second circuit, too, this leaving my heart too weak to keep up its own rhythm. Translation? Pacemaker.
1 out of every 100 SVT patients with a second current in their AV node ends up on a Pacemaker. It's independent of age, other health conditions, everything. There's no way of knowing where one circuit starts and the other begins.
And Mom seems to think that it's unreasonable that I'm scared shitless.
I'm scheduled to have the diagnostic done the second week in December: 11 Dec, they'll be sedating me, running multiple catheters up from my hip to my heart, and starting an SVT episode so they can track where the current is coming from and diagnose whether it's the AV node, an accessory pathway, or one of the other kinds.
And then, with "my" permission, they'll start zapping.
I go in at 9:30a, I'm there all day, and then I take it easy for the next few days. Assuming nothing goes wrong, of course.
Mum and Da say it's my decision, but they want me to go ahead and get it done. And yes, it's by body, I'm a legal adult, they can't really do anything without my permission...but with my family, does it really matter what I think?
I don't want to have to worry about suddenly having an episode and possibly passing out during a show, or while I'm operating machinery, or while I'm 20 ft off the ground working with a fly system. I don't want to be on pills for the rest of my life, gradually increasing in strength until I've got enough beta-blockers in my system to take out someone twice my size. I don't want to do irreperable damage to my blood pressure because of too many drops at the beginnings of episodes.
But, on the other hand, I'm too damn young to be on a Pacemaker.
I'm so scared.
SVT is caused by a secondary electical circuit existing the heart when there should only be one. An abnormal beat, which are single pulses that have something funky about them and exist even in normal hearts, can trigger a re-entry circuit in one or more chambers of the heart, creating a tachycardia (elevated heartrate).
There's a 60% chance that my SVT is AV nodal re-entrant tachycardia: the AV node has two currents rather than one, and periodically a feedback loop starts up in the node. One in six people has two currents in their AV node, but the currents are usually similar enough that they don't cause trouble. When they're different, the cause tachycardia. To fix this, they zap the AV node, burning out one of the circuits and leaving the other intact.
There's a 30% chance that it's caused by an accessory pathway: an extra node, often on the outer wall of the left atrium, that has it's own current, and can create a feedback loop in the left atrium and ventricle. This is treated by running a catheter from the right atrium to the left and then zapping the extra node out of existence.
There's a 10% chance it's something else from a list of four or five other things.
With the accessory pathway, there's a tiny chance they could perforate the walls of the heart when they're going through, and that would be really, really bad. But that almost never happens.
With the AV nodal re-entrant tachycardia, there's a 1% chance they could zap the second circuit, too, this leaving my heart too weak to keep up its own rhythm. Translation? Pacemaker.
1 out of every 100 SVT patients with a second current in their AV node ends up on a Pacemaker. It's independent of age, other health conditions, everything. There's no way of knowing where one circuit starts and the other begins.
And Mom seems to think that it's unreasonable that I'm scared shitless.
I'm scheduled to have the diagnostic done the second week in December: 11 Dec, they'll be sedating me, running multiple catheters up from my hip to my heart, and starting an SVT episode so they can track where the current is coming from and diagnose whether it's the AV node, an accessory pathway, or one of the other kinds.
And then, with "my" permission, they'll start zapping.
I go in at 9:30a, I'm there all day, and then I take it easy for the next few days. Assuming nothing goes wrong, of course.
Mum and Da say it's my decision, but they want me to go ahead and get it done. And yes, it's by body, I'm a legal adult, they can't really do anything without my permission...but with my family, does it really matter what I think?
I don't want to have to worry about suddenly having an episode and possibly passing out during a show, or while I'm operating machinery, or while I'm 20 ft off the ground working with a fly system. I don't want to be on pills for the rest of my life, gradually increasing in strength until I've got enough beta-blockers in my system to take out someone twice my size. I don't want to do irreperable damage to my blood pressure because of too many drops at the beginnings of episodes.
But, on the other hand, I'm too damn young to be on a Pacemaker.
I'm so scared.
Tags:
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
15/11/06 05:22 (UTC)I don't want to be on pills for the rest of my life either, but I am. And it beats being dead. So far :p
no subject
15/11/06 05:24 (UTC)no subject
15/11/06 05:26 (UTC)no subject
15/11/06 05:28 (UTC)