CARDIOLOGIST VISIT

A week ago I visited my cardiologist Dr Stephen Brown at Universitas Hospital in Bloemfontein, South Africa. I have two cardiologists – Dr Rosher monitors the rhythm of my heart and Dr Stephen Brown that monitors the physiological aspects of my heart. The reason why I make it a point to visit him or my other cardiologist at least once a year is twofold. The first reason is I want to make sure that my heart is still in sinus rhythm. It did happen to me previously (long ago with a visit to Dr Jordaan), my previous cardiologist, that I was out of rhythm, and his first words were “you’re heart is out of rhythm”. It came as a shock because I felt great and had no symptoms of AF. The thing was that my heart rate was kept down/slow by medication, and that made the symptoms of AF less obvious to me, but my heart was still out of sinus rhythm. So then I got the second shock, the cardioversion shock, and that put my heart back into sinus rhythm.

Being out of sinus rhythm was actually very dangerous because untreated all of us know that AF can cause a stroke or other problems like changing the “structure” of the heart. Continue reading Cardiologist visit – what happened →