Following up on my PVCs: it’s been a couple of months since I had the cardiac ablation procedure, which went very well, and was easier in every way from what I expected.
The worst part was that they had me arrive at 9:30am, but they didn’t get started until 1:30pm, and so I just lay in the hospital bed for four hours.
The anaesthesia was similar to what is given for a colonoscopy (so you’ll be awake but feel no pain), but actually I did fall asleep almost immediately and didn’t wake up until it was all over. They inserted catheters in the right femoral artery and both femoral veins to precisely map the PVCs and ultimately to ablate them with microwaves—burning the affected tissue. The PVC origin was just where they’d predicted based on my EKG: at the aortomitral continuity. They ablated the spot, and the PVCs went away, and then (as I read in the notes of the procedure) they all stood around for 45 minutes, to see if the PVCs would come back. They didn’t, and so they removed the catheters and closed up the insertion sites.
The whole thing took about 2 hours, including the 45 minutes standing around waiting to see if the procedure had worked. I then had to lie around for another 3 hours, but then I could walk out of the hospital and head home. My hips were a bit sore at the time, but they gave me some tylenol, and then I had no further pain.
I had to refrain from exercise for a week, but I was able to walk and go up and down stairs, and really felt perfectly fine. And data from my Polar H10 showed that the PVCs had almost completely gone away: over 24 hours I counted just 161 PVCs (vs ~20,000 previously), and analysis of that data required a lot of manual investigation, because there were more noise-based artifacts than PVCs, really showing the limitations of my crude methods for identifying PVCs and for cleaning the data.
A month after the procedure, I had a 48-hour Holter monitor, and the change is striking. I’m still having PVCs, particularly during exercise, but instead of a rate of 15-30% PVCs, I’m seeing about 0.1% when at rest and about 2% when exercising. Here’s a before-and-after plot of percent PVCs vs heart rate:
I don’t actually feel any different. I was hoping I might have some increased energy, but nope. I never noticed the PVCs, and I don’t notice anything different with their absence.