When I tell you not to ignore the flutters, I’m not talking about the kind of fuzzy warm feelings you get when you talk to someone you might like or see a puppy you might just need to take home. But I am talking about flutters of the heart.

In November 2022, I was the healthiest I had been in a long time. I had a personal trainer, was in the gym 3-4 days a week, was eating healthy, and had lost about 50 pounds. I was working full time as a nurse at a local hospital, proud of my accomplishments, and determined to grow stronger. 

All of that changed so quickly. During workouts, my heart rate would get close to the 200s and would take forever to come down. I would get dizzy, and then the heart flutters would start. But I mostly ignored it. After all, I had work to do and goals to reach. I didn’t say anything to anyone about it at first, but then it started happening even when I wasn’t working out. I would be at work taking care of patients or driving down the road and suddenly my head would start spinning and my heart would feel like it was doing flips in my chest. The episodes got to the point where I would need to sit down or pull over on the side of the road. One night, I was in Target with my best friend Carly and it happened again. I turned ghostly white and quickly sat on a display table so that I didn’t hit my head if I passed out (thank you medical training!). That was when I knew something was truly going on and I had to figure it out. I couldn’t ignore it any longer. 

At work the very next day, I talked with the doctor I worked with to see what he thought about the whole situation. He ordered an EKG for me just to see what my heart was doing, and my co-worker hooked me up to the EKG machine and ran the test. That looks normal, I thought. But the doctor didn’t think so. He looked at the test, and looked at me, looked at the test again, and said, “You have a heart problem and you gotta go to the cardiologist.” In disbelief, I laughed at him and was like, “No I don’t!” He explained that my EKG was abnormal and showed that I had a genetic electrical problem with my heart called Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome (WPW). I had never had any problems with my heart, so it was never detected when I was little. The doc called a cardiology friend of his and got me in the very next week for an appointment. 

On November 7, my appointment time came, I went in, and they confirmed that I had WPW. The condition required a procedure called an ablation where a surgeon would go in and burn off an extra electrical pathway. I had previously worked as a Cardiac ICU nurse, so I knew exactly what had to happen– I just never thought that I would be the heart patient instead of the nurse. Over the course of the next two weeks, I had to wear a heart monitor and would receive an ECHO (ultrasound) of my heart before I saw the electrophysiologist who would do the procedure. The ECHO was scheduled until November 27th, so I had 20 mandatory days of not working out and just taking it easy. Thanksgiving fell during that time, so I was perfectly ok with not working out and stuffing my face instead. November 27th came and my ECHO was the last appointment of the day. I’ve seen so many ECHOs performed and looked at tons of them in the ICU, so I wasn’t worried at all. 

I went in and the office was pretty peaceful and empty because the ECHO Tech was running behind. When it was finally my turn to go back, I hopped up and laid down on the exam table. The tech and I were just chatting away, talking about everything and nothing, when suddenly she got really quiet. She was focusing intensely on something on the screen. Curious, I looked up at the screen, and what I saw struck a panic in me and shifted my whole universe. I saw two large, round masses in my heart, specifically my left atrium, and I knew something was not right. I looked up at the Tech and said, “Well, that isn’t supposed to be there.” She was so calm and reassuring that everything was going to be ok and the doctor would look at it and could help figure it out. The rest of the ECHO took almost an hour and a half just because she took so many images and measurements. I asked if the doctor could come in and take a quick look at it before I left, but all the providers were gone. It was just me and the tech. I walked out of the office in a blurry state of shock. 

The first thing I did was call my Mom when I got into the car. When she answered I just said it straight out, “Something is wrong with me and I’m scared.” Trying to keep me calm (we tend to go straight to the dramatic side of things in our family), she tried reassuring me that it might be nothing. But as a cardiac nurse I knew it was a very big something. The first thing that came to mind was that there was a blood clot in my left atrium. Driving home, I actually convinced myself that I had a blood clot just bouncing around in there, waiting to break loose at any second. I was as nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs and nearly too paralyzed with fear to move. 

The next day, I called out of work because I knew I couldn’t focus on taking care of someone. And to be honest, I was still scared the blood clot was going to get me. At this time I was in grad school to become a Nurse Practitioner, and since it was finals time I decided just to work on my final paper. I waited and waited all day for a call from the doctor, but no one was calling. I ended up calling the office myself to see if he had read the scans yet, and his nurse informed me that he didn’t read them until the end of the day. He would call me by 5pm. Well, 5:00 rolled around, and no call. I tried to call back and it went straight to voicemail. My rational thinking actually surfaced and I told myself that it was a good sign because if it was something he would have called. I kept working on my paper, until about 6:30 pm when my phone started ringing. The caller ID showed “Vanderbilt Heart.” My stomach automatically dropped. I picked up quickly and my doctor was on the other line.

“Taylor, I don’t have good news,” he said. “You have two tumors in your left atrium. They’re called Myxomas and you’ll have to have open heart surgery soon to get them out.” What?!?  I am 27 years old, I thought. How do I have heart tumors? He went on to explain that he was going to call the surgeon he was going to be working with that night, but I explained that I used to work with CVICU and I wanted to request a certain surgeon. He said he would make it happen. I didn’t even have enough time to call my parents to tell them what was going on before the surgeon I requested called and set me up for a pre-op appointment the very next day for open heart surgery. Over the phone, the doctor explained everything about the tumors and where they were located. I would have my valve repaired and I would have to have a MAZE procedure which is like an ablation to get rid of the extra electrical pathway that caused the WPW. After I ended the call I was once again in a state of shock, but the first thing I did was call my parents. They were just as shocked as I was. 

My parents and family quickly descended into a hot mess. How did all this happen so suddenly? How did I go from a healthy 27-year-old with no medical problems one day, heart flutters the next, and then needing to have my chest cracked open for heart surgery? It didn’t make sense to any of us. That very next day I had to be at the cardiac surgeon’s office at 1pm. The doctors weren’t messing around. On the way to Nashville, the car was eerily silent and my parents were still sitting in shock at the news. Mom and Dad had been up all night crying, and I was just trying to be strong for them. I hadn’t cried because I knew what the road was ahead of me. I knew exactly how the pre-op surgery and recovery worked. I have helped hundreds of patients recover from this type of surgery… I just had to wrap my head around the fact that it was going to be me. It was my turn. When we were almost to Vanderbilt, the phone rang again. It was the surgeon nurse asking me if I knew exactly what I was coming to the hospital for and I was like,  “Yes,for a consult for cardiac surgery.” Silence was on the other end. Then she carefully replied, “No, you are being pre-oped for cardiac surgery tomorrow.” That was when it hit that this was happening. 

We made it to the doctor’s office and sat in a room. When the surgeon and nurse practitioner came in, their mouths dropped. They hadn’t put the name with my face and realized I was the patient. We had a little reunion because I didn’t work there anymore but then got right down to business. They explained everything would happen and that the tumors would be sent to pathology, but since they had never seen cancer in the heart they were pretty certain it was just myxomas. They explained that with my symptoms they wanted to do the surgery the next day, but I had other plans. I explained that it was finals week and I would rather wait until the next week because I wanted to finish my classes and not take tests in the hospital. They agreed that I could wait until the next Thursday, which was December 8, 2022. I finished my finals on December 7th and got ready for surgery the next day. The next morning I had to be at Vandy at 5 am to get prepped for open heart surgery. If this sounds like a whirlwind when I tell this story, it’s because that’s exactly how it happened. I was in surgery by 8:00 that morning and came out around 1:00 pm. 

Everything went perfectly and I got through the surgery with flying colors. The doctors were even able to take out the breathing tube inside the operating room because I was doing so well. When I made it to the ICU, it was like a family reunion. All of my co-workers were coming by to see me and all of my family was coming in and out. I don’t remember much else, but I do remember all I wanted was a fan. Finally that night I woke up enough to find out that I had three tumors in my heart and had to have my valve repaired because the tumors had damaged the valve. The doctor was 99% sure it wasn’t cancer because the tumors looked just like every other myxoma he had taken out. He said just focus on recovery and in six weeks I would be back to work. I was in the hospital for only four days. I was flying through recovery and doing great. I only had minimal pain from chest tubes. I was on the right path! I went home on the 12th of December and got settled into a routine of couch-to-bed, walk outside, and couch-to-bed. Recovery was progressing, the pain was minimal, and I felt pretty good just to have had open heart surgery. Thank goodness I had been working on getting healthy!

Part 2/4 coming soon..