I should have come here a long time ago

Hi all.

I'm 37. I was just diagnosed with AFib lil over a week ago at this point.

I have been spiraling something awful about it.

I started getting random palpitations 4 - 5 years ago. They did freak me out and I was in and out of the ER for a while, wore holtor monitors twice. was never admitted and never told I had an irregular heart beat.

At this point I'm fairly sure I've been flirting in and out of Afib for a couple years now. I would have "episodes" where my heart would beat really fast and I wouldn't be able to make it stop for a bit. Usually though I could stretch / do some vagal maneuvers and it would go away. The first time I went to the ER stuck in a high heart rate (180!) they said it was SVT, had me blow into a straw, told me my rhythm had been regular the whole time, sent me home.

So, when this latest episode of AFib started, I originally wasn't that concerned. And then it didn't go away, which was upsetting, but had happened before. But then, I couldn't walk up my stairs without blacking out and almost passing out from being so winded. I could barely walk 10 feet even. For a while somehow I was even coping about that, like ahhh i'll be fine.

Weirdly my HUSBAND got an allergic reaction at the same time and so we both went to the clinic. I was like ahh I'll just make sure I'm not like having a heart attack, and when they hooked me up they immediately detected the arrhythmia.

What happened after that was a blur of people making me feel like I was about to stroke out literaly any second. I got shipped from clinic to hospital in an ambulence and then got stuck in ER triage for 22 hours. Talked to a Cardio who assured me the situation wasn't life threatening and prescribed me some meds to help manage it. they were going to cardiovert me but I didn't have the strength at that point to wait around in the ER for any longer so I left ADA.

I have an appointment with my primary tomorrow and hopefully we can fast track an echo and ablation because I am barely hanging on.

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TLDR: pretty standard finding out you're in AFib story

Really all I'm looking for here is camaraderie. Just tell me your scary stories and then how everything turned out to be ok. And maybe what you did to cope while everything was not ok.