Back again and worse than ever !!!

[anjolive]

I've been diagnosed with pvc's & pac's in the past. Just had stress echo done with good results about 3 months ago. My pvc's come and go. I havent had any in about 3-4 months to speak of. But NOW this past week since Monday I'm having the worst I've ever had in 15 years. Instead of the normal "flutter" that comes on every couple of hours I'm now getting 3-5 second flutters every 10 minutes or so for about 2-3 hour intervals. I've never had that and now I'm nervous as heck !!!  I called my cardio center and they said they are gonna schedule me as soon as they can. I dont know what to think as I'm dreading this weekend already and counting the pvc's. Please can anyone shed some light on my experience right now ?

[anjolive]

Thanks so much for all your replies. I ended up going to the ER last night. Of course as soon as I got the my palps stopped !!!..Snapshot EKG was totaly normal. But they listened well and while I was hooked up to the EKG after I was admitted it showed the palps !!!  After about an hour of EKG monitoring it only showed 1 pvc. Hmmm...I asked the nurse just before they discharged me If it only showed 1 pvc then what the heck were all the flutters in my heart then ?  The ER doc finally came in and said it could be a viral infection and said he was happy to see that they were not pvc's...So what were they ?  

[Michael J. McWilliams, M.D.]

sounds normal, but would need to see the EKG because the computer interpretation can be wrong sometimes.

[anjolive]

I've been on a beta blocker for 15 yrs as well...Here is the report of my most recent EKG...

PR interval 0.12, QRS 0.08, QT 0.38, axis 50 degrees...Prominent R-wave in lead V2 and slight J-point elevations in leads II, III, aVF, V5 and V6.

Any thoughts ?

[Michael J. McWilliams, M.D.]

This sounds like the natural course of PVCs.  The come and go, sometimes worse than others.  If you have a normal EKG and stress echo and your monitoring only shows PVCs, your risk of cardiac events is similar to age matched population without PVCs.  The bigger problem is the symptoms and learning how to deal with the fear/anxiety when they happen.

They will probably go away just as fast as the come and you will have to fight to keep yourself from perseverating on the fear that they will come back.  I think this can be very similar to post traumatic stress type syndrome for people have severe symptoms.

I usually try a beta blocker or calcium channel blocker.  If the PVCs have a morphology that is common and easy to map, ablation is an option only if they are very frequent and  you understand the risks of the ablation are greater than the PVCs.  

It is a tough situation without a good answer, but they will go away again and are almost certainly the same problem, but still worth evaluating.

I hope this helps, thanks for posting.