Whoa, thanks for the amazing advice! I was in no way expecting so much information from professionals and so many useful anecdotes from people who have experienced the condition in real life and its effects. I think I'll go with AF, like Torrens and Blinkk said. WPW is very interesting, but I think it's not quite what I'm looking for.
I have no medical training, but my SO has atrial fibrillation. My SO was involved in a clinical study 3 years ago, where did they an experimental new surgery on his heart to try and fix the condition. They said his condition might come back in 20 years or so, but this far after the surgery, he's had no issues with his heart (yay!)
My SO's had it since childhood. Since he was a kiddo, about once a month his heart will go absolutely nuts. It'll beat really hard and jump out of his chest for about 5 minutes at a time. Then it chills and everything goes back to normal. He actually didn't know it was a medical condition. It never bothered him his whole life until his 40's. In his 40's it began to happen more frequently. Slowly, it increased to episodes about once a week. It would also start to last longer than 5 minute spans.
At its worst, it reached a point where his heart would beat fast for hours. The first time it reached 30 minutes of nonstop beating, we went to the hospital. Got diagnosed and began looking at treatment options. During really bad episodes I remember putting my hand on his chest and his whole chest was pulsing somewhere around 180-200 BPM. I remember that really well because of how scary it was; his whole chest was jumping up and down. Never seen anything like that. Very scary.
As for physical activities, my SO is pretty cool. He is Japanese so he practices tai chi, kendo, and does casual jo staff in the backyard. He's never had a heart attack, but he's also doesn't run or do action-movie-style fighting. His kendo is for health not combat, so it's focused, yet a chill pace. I was actually never aware this condition was life threatening until reading this thread. The docs never told us that. They told him to stop exercising while we were talking about treatment options, but once we got it handled he could go right back to that stuff.
If your SO has it and can do sports like Kendo, I think it's the right choice for my character. Ideally, I want the condition to be as non-life threatening as possible, and as continuous as possible. So I suppose I'll just say she has a very mild form of AF?
Hi team,
I'm a doctor so here's the DL.
Arrhythmias are common. They are a class of disorders and not a disorder itself. For example, cancer is a class of diseases and there are multiple types e.g. prostate.
The most common type of arrhythmia is atrial fibrillation (AF). It's super fricking common. Lots and lots of people, especially older, have it. Basically, it's caused by a faulty atrial pacemaker and instead of firing regularly from one spot, the atria fire at random times from random spots.
This gives you an irregularly irregular heart rhythm (as opposed to regularly irregular e.g. with types of complete heart block).
ANYWAY, patients with AF usually need medication. They either get rate or rhythm controlled. But this is quite complicated so it depends on how much info you want.
Most commonly, they go onto anticoagulants - the oldest and most common med being warfarin and the newer ones being dabigatran etc.
Let me know what specifics you need. PM me if you reply here so I don't miss it.
So just for clarity: is it the case that the average heartbeat, for the average person with no condition, is usually very regular? Like, most people usually have the same average number of beats per second (i.e. 1 beat per second, 1 beat per second, 1 beat per second, and so on)? I think AF would work for my character, but it sounds like it means a regular heartbeat most of the time, and then just a very extreme heartbeat sometimes. Ideally, I want my character to have a heartrate which varies with time, like, for example, 1 beat per second, then 2 beats per second, then 1.5 beats per second, etc, or is this not possible?
So instead of like, da-dunk, da-dunk, da-dunk, da-dunk, it's like, da-dunk . . . da-da-dank, da-dank, da-dunk, etc. I'm sorry if this isn't clear, it feels ridiculous typing this out, lmao. Is this AF?