The HHT and Afib Athlete

The Athlete part of the “HHT and AFib Athlete"   In case you didn’t guess, the athlete part was very tongue in cheek!   I liked sport at school but was always the slightly tubby one who was picked second from last for sports teams (S., frail, Indian, wore glasses, was always picked after me).   I liked doing sport a lot but was singularly bad at everything – I used to walk as much as I ran in cross-country; barely made the gap between the runway and the longjump long jump pit; once hit the high jump bar so hard I had a haemtoma haematoma the size of an elephant on my leg and could hardly walk; fell over a hurdle so badly I was scared to try again. Netball was okay because I was so tall but I was always Goal Defence which meant you didn’t really have to move. Think an oak tree wearing a tabard… I once tried out when our school was desperate for three netball teams for a tournament (so 7 players and 2 subs per team – grand total of 27 players needed).   About thirty girl

What is HHT? Most readers will come to this post from AFib forums and FB pages methinks.   And so, the title “HHT and AFib athlete” will be a bit mysterious to them. HHT is a common rare disease!   Yes, I know that is an oxymoron.   One person in 50,000 is diagnosed with it but campaigners believe 10 times that number may have it (i.e., 1:5,000).   So, in Britain that would mean about 1340 diagnosed cases but 13,400 undiagnosed! Here’s one scientific explanation of the condition from the Internet:   Hereditary Haemorrhagic Telangiectasia HHT is a hereditary, autosomal dominant disease of the blood vessels, which means that children of HHT patients have a 50% chance of inheriting the disease. Hereditary Haemorrhagic Telangiectasia (HHT or Rendu Osler Weber disease) is a relatively rare disease, and as a consequence, doctors often have little experience or knowledge of the disease. It is a complex disorder involving both a genetic susceptibility and other internal and e