Today has been an eventful day. I was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation the beginning of the covid pandemic. After a number of trips to A&E I was offered a place on a clinical trial comparing ablation to a placebo. An ablation is where a catheter is inserted into a vein in the groin and passed up into the heart. The cells causing the heart to misfire are then killed by freezing. The treatment has been used for a number of years but some doctors think there may be a strong placebo effect. I decided to volunteer for the trial because I think it's important to help medical science to advance and it also meant I would got to the top of the waiting list if it turned out that I had had the placebo.
I had the operation in March, but found out at the end of September that I had the been given the placebo procedure. So today I had the real ablation.
The procedure, at least in the UK, is done under sedation and local anesthetic. This makes the recovery time much quicker. The first one I had, the placebo one, was a walk in the park however the real one wasn't as pleasant. The worst part was when they were identifying which cells were causing the problem. I was drugged up to my eyeballs with morphine and