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My experience fits right in with the others here, except that I also have "diagnosed" PACs, which cause my HR to drop into the 50s (or 40s or even high 30s!!) when I really relax. When that happens, each pulse is BIG, which is probably a Good Thing, considering how few there are! My Cardio and...

Mine also pounds when I relax (ALSO ~9 months post-OHS!), but it's also way slow when it does, almost always <60 and often <50 and occasionally even <40(!!). Mine's been diagnosed (after a 48-hour Holter) as PACs, and the main treatment (according to my Cardiologist and Wikipedia both) is...

ElectLive, I'm having trouble figuring out why TAVI, or repeat TAVI, should work in a cow valve but not a pig valve. Any more details to go on? They seem to work fine in (bad) HUMAN valves. . .

Last week, my chest-strap monitor seemed to be reading too high -- like in the high 140s during my cardiac rehab, when the nurse and I both got more like 120! I've since replaced its battery, haven't tried it again yet. I'm sometimes getting PACs, so it's conceivable that the electrodes pick up...

OT1H, many of us were told to avoid NSAIDS ("under penalty of death"?!?), and OTOH, many of us were prescribed a baby Aspirin/ASA every day, with and without Warfarin/Coumadin! Hmmm. My Cardio had me popping 81mgs of ASA daily starting years pre-op, and my surgeon and hospital prescribed it...

Good progress, Steve, don't stop! Your exercise at 3-ish months continues to be more strenuous than mine at ~8.5! I'm still at 3 miles of 3:1 walk-jog, which took me 43 minutes at Wednesday's rehab class. I wonder why you couldn't also drop the BB, 5 months after your latest A-fib. Wasn't it...

Bump, in case somebody missed it who's got some wisdom to share about PACs, etc.

It sounds like you've already had it checked out with a Holter or some such (judging by "the odd ectopic beat", which I think is hard to detect otherwise, no?). At ~8.5 months post-op, otherwise great, I've recently started noticing very low HR (50s or 40s and even 30s!) when I am in bed or...

My recent 48-hour Holter-monitor electrodes were attached with some new-fangled super-aggressive adhesive tape that was pretty painful to remove and left goopy ridges at the tape's edges. I worked at them with baby oil, fairly gently but over and over, and a few of them left little areas of...

Almost 8.5 months post-AVR now, and still experiencing a REALLY slow heart-rate, with really big individual pulses, especially when I'm in bed or sitting still for a long time. In response (and after some prompting from my Cardio Rehab nurse and others), I called my cardiologist and spent 48...

Sounds like an assignment for epstns to me! Don't forget that lots of heart doctors (including all of mine, AFAIK) say that there's NO valve-life-shortening effect of exercise, and there's some logic to that, despite the direct correlation between patient age and valve longevity. Specifically...

I wonder if there would be a way to construct a randomized trial, or any other kind of statistical data to try to show an effect, either way. I'm sure LOTS of us athletic AVR types would love to know. Here's a related question that might be much simpler to answer: It's widely understood...

It's not unusual to have an enlarged heart -- and especially an enlarged LV -- both before and after AVR, because that's part of how the heart compensates for AVStenosis. But if that's what you've got, from an AVR more than two years ago (you give your ages, but not the dates), then you may have...

Lyn, there's some vagueness in the language of the article, but I think my inference is reasonable. Here's some of the language: And in the later passage where they talk about their "aggressive approach in the treatment of prosthetic valve endocarditis": The footnote refers to a 2007 article...

And another +1 to what Steve said, and even for keen or aggressive athletes, too! My stenosis was well into the "severe" range, well under 1.0 cm2, before I finally felt ANY symptoms. All of this not only makes me content with my 2-point-something cm2 current AVA with the pig valve, it also...

Adrienne, I'm sure that any "valver" who's lived through endocarditis would be tempted to support the old protocol, but I think it's just as easy to see your case as support for the NEW one! Heck, you were following the old protocol when you got the endocarditis, right? That's one of the main...

The surgeon just indicated that the early measurements are usually (or at least "often") much smaller/tighter than later ones. As I recall, my cardiologist told me that he didn't have the exact eff. area from the later (3-month?) echo, but that it was over 2 sq. cm.. I haven't memorized that...

And (TaDa!!) here he is! Several websites and a few people here have claimed in the past that there's better durability from bovine (pericardial) than porcine, but I've never seen that documented in published studies. And the single tissue valve with the best documented durability in published...

Congrats and all the best from a newbie, Rich. If you haven't read "The Median Isn't the Message" by Stephen Jay Gould, at http://cancerguide.org/median_not_msg.html , you might find it helpful.

Fascinating discussion, thanks all! You might be interested in "Cardiac rehabilitation: What works, what doesn't, and why", at http://www.theheart.org/article/1257713.do?utm_campaign=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_source=20110728_EN_Heartwire . I initially thought it might be "What works...