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Mar. 3rd, 2007 04:53 pmAfter my scary afternoon at the end of January, I had an appointment with my gynecologist. She said she looked up the letrozole in the Physician's Desk Reference and found nothing about rapid heart rate as a known side effect. She wanted me to see my internist and make sure nothing else was wrong with me.
The next week I went to the internist--or technically the nurse practicioner--who did a physical exam and an EKG. She found "changes" in my EKG since the last one I had, which was sometime last year, and referred me to my cardiologist. Oh, with a side of "You're trying to get pregnant and you put things into your body that you don't know what they are?!?" in reference to the Chinese herbs that my acupuncturist had prescribed.
Thursday afternoon I had the cardiologist appointment. Same doctor who, eight years ago, cured my sinus node reentrant tachycardia with an ablation procedure. He says 1) that he thinks the rapid heartrate of January *was* caused by the new medicine and 2) that my EKG shows something called Intraventricular Conduction Delay...the electrical impulse that runs down from the right atrium to the ventricles is slower than it should be. This is not really a problem, although in future it may develop into something called "Heart Block", when the "bottom half" of the heart rhythm doesn't complete at all between "upper half" ticks. If that happens I'd need a pacemaker.
All that said, even though he thinks the letrozole is the cause of my problem, he'd be willing to let me try taking it again, with a heart monitor at hand in case of further issues. However, I'm to have a stress echocardiogram before making that decision, in order to rule out any structural problems in the heart. That will happen next Wednesday.
The next week I went to the internist--or technically the nurse practicioner--who did a physical exam and an EKG. She found "changes" in my EKG since the last one I had, which was sometime last year, and referred me to my cardiologist. Oh, with a side of "You're trying to get pregnant and you put things into your body that you don't know what they are?!?" in reference to the Chinese herbs that my acupuncturist had prescribed.
Thursday afternoon I had the cardiologist appointment. Same doctor who, eight years ago, cured my sinus node reentrant tachycardia with an ablation procedure. He says 1) that he thinks the rapid heartrate of January *was* caused by the new medicine and 2) that my EKG shows something called Intraventricular Conduction Delay...the electrical impulse that runs down from the right atrium to the ventricles is slower than it should be. This is not really a problem, although in future it may develop into something called "Heart Block", when the "bottom half" of the heart rhythm doesn't complete at all between "upper half" ticks. If that happens I'd need a pacemaker.
All that said, even though he thinks the letrozole is the cause of my problem, he'd be willing to let me try taking it again, with a heart monitor at hand in case of further issues. However, I'm to have a stress echocardiogram before making that decision, in order to rule out any structural problems in the heart. That will happen next Wednesday.
