Chapters Transcript Video Patient Story Example Video Hi, my name is John and I was diagnosed with a FIB in 2016. As a kid growing up, I always had an interest in cars and trucks and tractors and things of that nature. I started playing guitar actually when I was nine or 10 years old and it's something that I enjoyed and followed me through and was very meaningful. So once our kids were born and I was working 70 hours a week, that whole piece went aside. But so that hobby came back to me once the car hobby started becoming a way of making a living. I own with another gentleman, a business that sells cars, repairs cars and we sell auto parts. I was diagnosed with aphids when I woke up in the middle of the night with some really, really bad pain and it turned out that I had two large kidney stones. So I went into the hospital and they put me in and then they uh neurologist the next day um did a procedure to break up the stones. My name is Karen, I'm john's wife. I was there, I was in the waiting room the entire time and I thought, how could this operation be taking so long. Nobody came out to tell me anything to tell me how the progress was going. And I went up to the uh, you know, to the desk there and I said, what's going on with my husband and they said, yeah, no, the operation is over, but he's having some complications. And when I woke up I was in the recovery room and I hear this Ding Ding Ding Ding, the nurse comes over and says to me, oh my God I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I said don't be sorry just do something. And that was the last thing I remember. And I woke up in this uh on the intermediate floor. I guess it was Not the coronary care unit, not the normal normal surgical floor, but one in between. And I was hooked up to all the usual stuff oxygen and wires and not allowed to get out of bed. So I was that way in the hospital for 10 or 12 days. And that was that was not a pleasant experience. This was the first uh health problem that was clearly good take my life away. And john seems to have a lot of trouble accepting the his limitations and his physical status. He just seemed to have a really hard time with it. And he was emotionally like a regressed. Uh so that he was very angry and and and lashing out. It took me an hour and a half, two hours to do what I normally do in 20 minutes and just had to keep sitting down because I had no energy and so on. And that was very depressing because at that point I didn't know whether that was something that was gonna pass quickly slowly or if at all. You know on one hand you could say it took about six weeks. That's about what it took before I was back to work regularly and and functioning. On the other hand, you could say it took six years, but it was dealing with the frequent lightheadedness and dizziness that really threw a curve and just probably up until about the last six months um there's a lot of light headed dizziness going down. If I were talking to someone who had just been diagnosed with a fib I think I tell them that it's not something that's solved quickly and there's a lot of treatments for it and there are a lot of different ways it presents it can be dealt with will be dealt with. But part of the thing is to try and keep your own stress level down about it because that will only make it once. It's a challenge. It's really how you're gonna face it and how you're going to accept it or reject it or fight it or give into it and you know, just let your life be controlled by it. So it took a long time to get through that curve. Just work with it and give it time and with any luck at all, you'll find yourself living with it and doing okay Created by
