I stared at her, afraid to ask what she meant. Dr. Shah explained that several earlier ECGs could have looked normal because my problem did not happen every second of every day. Continuous monitoring, however, had caught something my previous visits had missed. Then she turned the screen slightly toward me and said, very carefully, “Your heart is periodically beating dangerously slowly.”
PART 2
I stared at Dr. Shah because I had spent so long hearing that nothing was wrong that the truth felt almost impossible to accept. She explained that the electrical signal inside my heart was sometimes failing to travel the way it should, causing my pulse to drop far below a safe rate. Stress could make people feel dizzy, she said, but stress could not explain what the monitor had recorded while I was lying quietly in a hospital bed. For the first time, my symptoms were not an opinion—they were numbers on a screen.
