Had my first visit to the cardiologist today.
I have paroxysmal Atrial Fibrillation, which means it happens occasionally, lasting a few minutes to a few hours and then stops on its own. He showed me on his laptop a calculator that indicates the chances of stroke given all my risk factors and the result was 0. So for now it is just an aspirin a day as far as medication goes. (Yay!)
He stressed that it is nothing I have done to cause this and that I shouldn't slacken off on the exercise at all. I talked about the low heart rate and how last year I had noticed it drop to 36 on a couple of occasions but again he said that given my exercise regime and long history of low heart rate that it was nothing to worry about. (He took my pulse again while I was sitting there and it was 52).
He is 100% sure it will happen again, and as I age it will become more frequent, so unless the upcoming tests show abnormalities in the heart it will be a case of just watching.
I am now wearing a heart monitor for 48 hours so he can see if there are any irregularities in heart rate that I don't notice.
In 2 days I'll have an echo-cardiogram and next week a nuclear stress test. I then see him again on April 29th, just before we set off on our 6 month holiday.