Dizziness & pressure after heart surgery

Posted By  CCF CARDIO MD-sc on October 13, 1997 at 14:37:11:

In Reply to: Dizziness & pressure after heart surgery posted by Yolanda Knaszak on October 01, 1997 at 17:59:27:

: i am a 78 yr old female-I had an aoritc aneryism (sp?) removed and replaced with a cow's valve at CCF in November 1996. I am currently taking 2.5 coumadin/0.25 linoxin/25m captropil/20 m furosemide/120m cardizen/20meq potassium/i have been getting sever dizzy spells & pressure across my forehead/I had a cat scan done and have seen a sinus doctor to no avail.I feel great otherwise.But I get unsteady on my feet and feel like I may fall when I walk.Any help you may give will be appreciated.thank you.

[CCF Cardio MD sc]

Dear Ms Knaszak
There are a number of conditions that can cause the symptoms you are experiencing. It is impossible for me to go into all of them so I will try to focus on the more significant and likely ones. First of all the dizziness you are experiencing may be due a fall in your blood pressure. You are on a number of medications that may lower your blood pressure and if you take these medications at the same time their additive effect may be to much. One way to confirm this would be either to check your blood pressure when you are experiencing these symptoms or even better to get a continuous blood pressure monitoring device which can give you trends in your blood pressure rather than instantaneous readings. This mechanism can be excluded relatively easily by these methods.
A more important mechanism that could  cause your symptoms could be cardiac arrhythmia