Next: Catheter Ablation?

     I saw my cardiologist on September 29, and he told me to stop the Multaq and to throw away the pills I had left. He decided to stop the ExForge--the blood pressure medicine--and to substitute Edarbi. He gave me a month's supply of the pills.
     He then explained to me a procedure called 'catheter ablation,' which he said might be particularly suited to my condition. Catheters are introduced in your groin and are pushed up the arteries (or it it veins?) into the heart. Some radio/electronic device is supposed to detect the area or spot where the fibrillation originates, and the spot can be 'ablated'--destroyed, zapped.
      I have researched this procedure and I have seen nothing that indicates under what circumstances it is called for--except when medications do not help the fibrillation, which seems to have been my case with the infamous Multaq. What eludes me is how serious is my fibrillation. In this session with my cardiologist he did get the technician who monitors pacemakers to check if I was 'in fibrillation'--and the answer was 'yes.' Which was a repeat of the result when I had the pacemaker tested at three months. On the other hand, when I check my pulse myself, it usually seems very regular.
What has concerned me since this consultation is that my blood pressure seems all over the place. Sometimes very high, and sometimes very low. I was told that the new medicine might take ten days or so to kick in, but the ten days are well past now, and the results are strange: highly variable. So much so that one evening, with readings upwards of 170 over 110, we checked with the doctor's office and the duty cardiologist suggested we go to the Emergency Room at Sibley Hospital, which confirmed a reading of 190 for the systolic. In the end, after blood and urine tests, they let me go with the message that readings above 220 over 120 were regarded as 'dangerously high,' and that I should contact my doctor about adjusting the blood pressure medicine. That was on Friday night--October 14--and since then all the readings have been on the low side. So heaven knows what is going on.
This coming Thursday, Joan and I will talk to the ablation doctor.