I recently had a procedure called an ablation for atrial fibrillation, which is a kind of fast heart rate. A. fib often comes from abnormal electrical impulses arising on the left side of the heart, in the left atrium. You fix it by treating the area around the source of the impulses with a catheter that uses energy to create a ring of scar tissue that acts like an insulator.

The problem is, that you have to get the catheter into the left atrium, but you can’t pass it directly there, since it goes into the body through a big vein. The vein leads the catheter into the right atrium. And THEN then you have to punch it through the wall between the right and left side (the interatrial septum) to get the catheter into the left side of the heart. That leaves a little hole in that wall.

For most people, that hole isn’t much of a problem. But if you scuba dive, you form bubbles in your veins that are normally filtered out by the lungs so they don’t get to the left side and cause problems (decompression illness). That hole lets the bubbles bypass the lungs. So today, I had a bubble study to make sure that it had healed. And it seems to have healed!

Check out this video I made to show how this is done. They inject bubbles into a vein and then they can watch them with an echocardiogram. Looks good… bubbles are staying on the right side. The wall is holding. Let’s go diving!

Thanks to Dr. Davendra Mehta and the team at Mount Sinai Morningside for taking such good care of me…