Jan's Profile

I was first diagnosed with a heart murmur in my senior year of high school in 1964 at my college physical exam (required in those days)--who knows how long I'd had the murmur--I'd seen a doctor once before for an isolated episode of (undiagnosed) severe abdominal pain, otherwise NO medical care whatsoever after childhood vaccinations. That's often how it was in the dark ages. Anyway no one seemed to care much about my murmur, so I didn't either. (In defense of my doctor at that time--who was really cute btw--mitral valve prolapse had not yet even been given a name in medical literature--it was first named by Dr. Barlow in 1966.) I started having "skipped beats" sometime in my twenties, eventually longer bouts of arrhythmias, and was diagnosed with mitral valve prolapse in my early thirties--by a cardiac resident-in-training by auscultation only (echocardiograms were also in their infancy in the dinosaur days). Mitral valve prolapse was a popular diagnosis for young skinny women in the seventies and eighties and nobody seemed real worried about it. Finally had my first echo about 8 yrs ago, told "a fair amount of mitral regurgitation". Fast forward to March 2015 with "moderately severe regurgitation", proceeding to "severe regurgitation" in October 2015.