I had heart surgery #shorts #science

Of all the things to happen in a year, I never thought that me needing heart surgery would be one of them. I had heart surgery last month, and as someone who is passionate about both science and education, I really wanted to talk about it. So, I was at the gym one day doing a totally normal workout when my heart rate kicked up, and I just thought that I was doing good cardio, but it stayed really high. So, I put my hands on the sensors on the treadmill, and it said my heart rate was 220, which seemed insane. So, one of the girls from the front desk checked it with a pulse oximter, and it did say 220. So, I went to urgent care and of course, by the time I checked in, they took my vitals, my heart rate was back down to normal, but they of course did an EKG and a blood test just to make sure. The EKG showed an abnormality in my heartbeat. They found something called Wolf Parkinson White syndrome. So, in overly simplified terms, because there's a lot of electrical activity going on in your heart, the place where your heartbeat starts is the syinoatrial node or the SA node. This is the one that triggers the atria to contract. Then the electrical signal goes into your atrio ventricular node which my pediatric cardiologist uncle pictured here in the 1970s says is like the toll booth. It basically stops things just long enough so that they're not beating at the exact same time. The AV node allows the ventricles to contract a little bit later than the atria and then that pumps blood into your body. The abnormality that they found was best expressed here which my uncle tells me is called a delta wave. Your normal heartbeat should go straight up. But I have this curve and that showed that my AV node was actually not working. There was another electrical impulse that was working ahead of my AV node. So my electrical impulse is going SA node other pathway. And when my heart rate got up to 220, it's because it went back into the AV node and that triggered tacoc cardia. The good thing is this is actually a really easy thing to solve. They just burn off that extra electrical pathway with an ablation. During an ablation, they feed catheters through a vein in your groin up into your heart and then 3D map your heart, probe around and figure out where that extra impulse is, freeze it to see if it's actually what's causing the irregular beat. And if it is, they burn it. Then they wait, make sure that it holds, take the catheterss out, and your heart's back to normal. The weirdest part about the surgery, though, is in my case, I had to be awake the whole time. So, I got to watch the 3D map on the screen over the operating table come to life as this like gray snake, which I was like, "Oh, that's my vein." And then see this map of my heart take shape and I was like, "Oh, that's neat." I was like out of it enough to just be fascinated but very much watching the entire thing happen. So, I guess the moral of the story is if you ever feel your heart do anything weird, get it checked out. You might not know that you were born with a heart condition like me.