What thirty episodes in a year actually costs.

This is a personal account of one person's experience tracking health data through a health event. It is not medical advice, and it does not describe what any app or device can do for you. Individual experiences vary.

There is a version of this story that stays analytical throughout. Signal, investigation, pattern, system, outcome. Clean and logical. That version is true, but it leaves something important out.

In the months leading up to the ablation procedure, I was not in good shape. Not in the way that shows up clearly in a report, but in the way that shows up when you look in a mirror or step on a scale or try to explain to someone why you can't play sport anymore.

Episodes were occurring almost every night. Sometimes in the evening too, before I had even tried to sleep. The pattern that had been manageable — occasional, convertible, liveable — had become something else. I was getting four, maybe five hours of sleep on a good night. On a bad one, considerably less. I was losing weight. I looked pale. People who knew me noticed.

Padel — four matches a week for years, one of the consistent anchors of my physical life — stopped completely. Not because I was told to stop, but because the combination of sleep deprivation and unpredictable episodes made it impossible to sustain any kind of training load. The body was not recovering between nights, let alone between sessions.

Chronic sleep deprivation is not simply tiredness. It is a condition that degrades judgment, emotional regulation, and the ability to think clearly under pressure. The irony of this period was that the moment when clear thinking was most needed — to manage a complex, recurring medical situation, to track episodes accurately, to communicate precisely with clinicians — was exactly the moment when clear thinking was hardest to maintain.

This is part of why the structured system mattered as much as it did. It wasn't built from a position of intellectual curiosity. It was built under pressure, by someone who was running out of reserves. The templates, the calendar entries, the structured notes — they existed partly to compensate for the fact that memory and judgment were not reliable. If the system hadn't been capturing the data consistently, I'm not sure the picture presented to my cardiology team would have been accurate enough to support the decisions that followed.

The decision to proceed with the ablation procedure was not a small one. It carries real risks, requires general anaesthesia, and demands a recovery period that itself requires careful management. But by February 2026, the alternative — continuing as things were — had become untenable. The trajectory was clear, and it was not pointing anywhere good.

I'm writing this not because it makes for a dramatic story, but because it's the part of the experience that most people in similar situations will recognise and that the clinical language tends to flatten. "Thirty episodes" is a number. What it actually means is thirty nights of waking up with a pounding, irregular heart rate and lying there in the dark, watching the hours go, knowing the day ahead will be harder because of it. Repeated, over months, with no reliable end in sight.

That is the context in which the system described in the rest of this series was built. Not as an engineering exercise. As a response to a situation that had become genuinely difficult to live with.