How I’m Beating Atrial Fibrillation

I'm not a doctor.   I’m going to tell you in my own layman’s terms, in my own layman’s understanding, how I’m beating what once was persistent atrial fibrillation. I don’t know exactly when it started, but by my mid 30s, I had persistent afib.   At routine checkups, the doctor might mention I had a little irregularity in my heartbeat.   The air of nonchalance in his or her voice seemed to assure me that some irregularity was normal.   I remember many times kneeling down in the aisles of Home Depot, looking at something on a low shelf, and getting dizzy after standing up, quickly looking for a safe place to fall if I fainted.   That's orthostatic hypotension – low blood pressure – a common symptom of a heart that isn’t beating efficiently.   One day I’d gone into the hospital at age 42 for a strange, debilitating illness that turned out to be mono, and upon intake, the nurse noticed my pulse was racing at 180bps.   Turns out that, on top of the mono, I was having an afib epi