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PaulHoule04/01/20250 repliesview on HN

I fainted when I was an exercise class. I'd had too much to eat before then, my digestion was pretty slow then, also it was a crazy hot day in a building with a pool (high humidity) and an old HVAC system. Didn't help that I had a crush on the instructor and was trying even harder because of that.

Woke up on the ground feeling very relaxed. Got a medical workup that checked a lot of things, they had me wear a Holter monitor for a month. In the last 30 minutes of the study period they caught five bad heartbeats of A-Fib when I was sleeping. Funny one of my evil twin's schemes went south around then and I (we?) were feeling really bad about it. My cardiologist told me that the threshold was one bad heartbeat so I have A-Fib and have a risk of strokes, he recommended that I take a baby aspirin as it has a mild blood thinning effect.

Around the beginning of the next year I developed a deep vein thrombosis which got cleared up with Eliquis, a blood thinner. The emergency room referred me to my primary care doc who ran all sorts of tests and couldn't find a reason for the DVT so he decided to keep me on Eliquis indefinitely, the cardiologist figured that covered the A-Fib so I dropped the aspirin because the combination could cause excessive bleeding.

I have one of those credit card Kardia EKGs and haven't seen an A-Fib episode yet. For the decade before I got that workup I did crazy amounts of cardio (helped me stay sane under incredible pressure) and around the time my evil twin was out I was getting up in the morning before sunrise, hiking 6 miles, going to the gym during the day, going out in the evening and hiking another 6 miles. My cardiologist says I have "Athlete's heart" with an abnormally low resting heart rate (drops below 50 at night when I get a good night's rest) and I shouldn't do more than an hour of cardio a day, so I don't.