Monday, April 16, 2007

Event #13

This was an odd event. I woke up early this morning (0300ish) and I was fluttering. I woke again at 0500 and my heart was still fluttering. Part of my morning ritual is to weigh myself and I noted that I was about 1 lb under the norm. Based on my minimal activities yesterday, other than the walk with the dog, I concluded that I was slightly dehydrated. I know that dehydration has been a precursor for the flutter. I had a bowl of cereal and banana for breakfast and then headed to work. I drank a hot cup of decaf tea and then a couple of glasses of water. Around 1000 I noticed that my flutter had stopped. I came home for lunch and had a bowl of minestrone soup along with some fruit. I waited all afternoon for my flutter to return and nothing came. After work and a fine haircut, I came home, walked the dog and had dinner (baked potato with turkey chili on top...and some cheese). As I write, I still have not fluttered and actually feel pretty good. One can only hope that I have a good night.

1 comment:

Jim said...

Dom, after catching up on your series of events, I think I tend to agree with Deb. There seems to be a definite correlation of your flutter with your diet. I am not discounting atrial fibrilation (sp?) but some of the pain and spasms could be GI related. Below is a long story but it may give you some thoughts.

As you may remember my story from a couple of years ago, I went to the ER because I thought I was having the inevitable heart attack. Never mind that I was running 30 miles a week at that time. After a couple of hours of bloodwork, xrays, aspirin and nitro patches, they determined it was not heart related. They held me over and did an angiogram just to take a look around. I had previously had a nuclear stress test that I had passed with flying colors but the cardiologist needed a new Mercedes and BCBS is rich so we did the angio. Clean. I am sitting here, talking to a cardiologist with my chest feeling like it's about to explode, doubled over in pain, heart racing. He's saying my heart is fine-go figure. They finally got a GI doc to do endoscopy on me and what a mess they found. I was well into third stage of 4 stages of erosion. Almost through wall failure in several places. According to the GI doc, that kind of erosion causes all kinds of symptoms. The big one being esophagheal spasms. The spasms affect the entire chest area and send all kinds of phantom pains to parts of your body that have nothing to do with your GI tract. Also according to him, once an episode of spasm starts, the heart will race (due to the pain) and once that happens it is sort of a vicious circle.

Foods that I had to stay away from and continue to limit-
tomato, citrus fruit, bananas (yes, bad for the GI), whole milk, caffeine, anything FRIED (tough on us southerners), chocolate (bummer), alcohol (liquor to be more precise).

You may want to avoid these things for a week or so and just see what happens.