Cinnamon Arrhythmia

Back in October of 2009 I wrote about my Arrhythmia with my heart. I traveled to Seattle to have a specialist perform a Cardiac Ablation which was supposed to fix my arrhythmia. That procedure failed and left my doctors standing around scratching their heads.

I was given some meds to reduce the occurrences and length of my arrhythmia episodes, but it was not a solution. Eventually my arrhythmia went away on it’s own and I quit taking the meds. Then without warning the arrhythmia came back which led me to really think about what I was doing.

When I first saw a doctor about this and found out I would have to travel to Seattle to have the Cardiac Ablation I stopped doing everything that was not “normal” for me. I stopped my diet, I quite taking my vitamin supplements. I just tried to take it easy and relax more.

When my Arrhythmia went away on it’s own months and months later down the line I started back up on a new diet. Then, one by one I started adding supplements back into my system. I noticed that shortly after I added Cinnamon back into my system the arrhythmia returned. If I stopped taking it the arrhythmia would go away. If I added it back again it would return. So I have quit taking Cinnamon supplements all together.

This information may be helpful for someone else so I am blogging about it.

The irony of this is that I have always been told that cinnamon is supposed to be great for heart heath.

Not Fixing My Arrhythmia

I am back from Seattle now. Back to cold, wet, snowy Juneau Alaska. My trip did not fix my Arrhythmia like I and everyone was hopping. I have officially stumped the doctors at Virginia Mason and told that what I have was something that was not life threating and since I grew into this I could very well grow out of it. That is just a depressing answer to get from a doctor who specializes in hearts.  I will be doing some follow up visits with the local doctor and keeping in touch with the guy from Seattle. Will see what happens.

A few higlights from the trip are:

  • I got to see my dad who I have not seen in about 7 years
  • It took the nurses 6 tries to get my I.V. Started. (I passed out after the 3rd attempt)
  • The doctor was not able to poke my heart in a way to get it do it’s Arrhythmia thing. Nor was he able to get it to go crazy with drugs. Only after I swallowed water could they see the Arrhythmia which caused my doctor to laugh.
  • He called in other doctors to watch this who also laughed.
  • I was told that out of all my doctors colleagues only one had see something like this before about 20 years ago or so.
  • I was lied to about how much it was going to hurt.
  • I shared a recovery room with an older guy who had a hearing aid that would keep going off.
  • I was unable to obtain a video tape copy of the procedure to post to youtube.