@A MyBCTeam Member, you point up the fact that there really is not set protocol physicians or patients are following with respect to post-treatment followup. It also points up that we must remain very sleuthy and exhaustively persistent in our search for corrections to those items that creep up....or come here, and rely on our super-sleuthy Sister Soldiers. 👍😉

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Thanks for asking, @A MyBCTeam Member!
He said we need to compile some data before we can implicate anything specific. He suspects its electrical, but isn’t ruling out they there’s a muscle component. Very unusually, he gave a good analogy: he said if you beat a wall with a hammer, you might indeed damage the wall. You may or may not also damage a few wires or pipes behind the wall. Hammer equals chemo; wall equals muscle; wires equal natural pacemaker, pipes equal vessels. Oy!🙄😏
Had a stress test, next up echocardiogram and two day monitor. Jan 2nd he will debrief me.

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This has always been a concern of mine. I had CAF chemo, Taxol, Tamoxifen and Arimidex and not once was the possibility of heart issues mentioned. I had read about it on my own and decided to visit a cardiologist. My first visit I had a stress test and EKG but unfortunately, due to my implants ( textured at the time and unable to move around) he could not get a good view of my heart with a stress echo. It's been almost 21 years and I have since had my implants replaced 3 times. I now have smooth implants and they move a bit so I went back for my stress echo and they were able to see almost everything. He said my heart looks good and no sign of damage from the chemo.

With that said, I have had occasional A-FIB bouts in the last 8 months. My cardiologist told me to buy the Kardia Mobile device ($100 on Amazon) and keep track of any A-FIB and we would decide what to do from there. You put the Kardia App on your phone and when you have an A-FIB episode you pull out your tiny Kardia and place it next to your phone. You then place your fingers on the Kardia machine.The app will read your heartbeat for 30 seconds and tell you your beats per minute. You can email the results ( it looks just like an EKG readout) to yourself and print and bring to your doctor or you can arrange for the results to go straight to your doctors office. What an invention!

My A-Fib is not too often so right now I am not be treated in any way and I will see my cardiologist again in a couple of months. There needs to be much more discussion on this subject. Of course I would have taken the chemo and all the other meds even if I knew in advance of possible heart problems but I think we need to be educated of the possible health issues caused by our treatment and our doctors don't seem to be doing a good job.

Are you Hypo or Hyper Karen? I am Hyperthyroid and while meds helped, what really did the trick was Atenelol. (sp?) Calmed those off-beats right down. And oh god, the pounding heart was so annoying! Who knew the thyroid could cause such commotion!

Then I had ablation on the thyroid and it normalized so I am off meds. So now I get the heart pounds and off-beats just once in a while. I never associated it to anything from BC treatment because I've always had something. I don't think Estrogen helps either.. yay estrogen :-/

And my cardiologist cleared me. I dipped low during Herceptin treatment and we stopped. A year later the cardiologist said he didn't need to see me anymore because my heart was fine.

Let us know what you find out!

Update to my cardio work-up, Ladies:

While the 48-hr Holter Monitor revealed occasional extra beats, they appear to be insignificant enough. The Stress Test was benign (and suggests I’m very much in the middle of the pack particular to my being a 51-year-old woman...this I should be grateful for, I know, considering my treatment course).
The echocardiogram caught an event, which I appreciated because, you know, who doesn’t wrestle with the idea that all this crap might be in your head when communicating that you have a concern, yet the technological evidence doesn’t back up your claim.

Even with the finding on echo, my cardiologist concludes that on the whole it is of no consequence at this rate, but to contact him if it increases. And he advised, in light of this cropping up somewhat recently, to look at any uptick in external factors like caffeine, stress....

Stress...

...

I thought I was reasonably persevering in the face of my cruelly cold husband. Apparently I’m not, and it’s impact since diagnosis is coming home to roost.
I have a lot to think about, and I dread the process.

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