During the 2022 Kroger Heart Mini-Marathon, I experienced dizziness. My vision blacked out and my heart rate spiked. The same thing happened in Boston a few weeks later, then again in the Flying Pig Marathon, when I knew something was seriously wrong.
You don’t realize how important your health is until it’s taken away from you.
I believed low iron and dehydration caused my symptoms while running. My primary care physician sent me to a cardiologist, who supplied a heart rate monitor that doctors could watch. That afternoon, I jogged with friends at a light, conversational pace. An hour later, doctors called to explain that my heart rate was over 230 beats per minute.
An ablation at The Christ Hospital revealed electrical issues in my heart. I was going into ventricular tachycardia, the second-deadliest heart rhythm you could go into. The electrical issues in my heart were fixed with surgery at Cleveland Clinic. Though the exploratory ablation was successful, the cause was still unknown. I was given a defibrillator in March 2023 as ventricular tachycardia can come back worse than it did before.
While my story has a happy ending, that is not the case for many americans. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the US, more than all cancers combined. This is why supporting the AHA is so critical to me.
