Dr Hesslein was able to diagnose Dahlia’s issues pretty easily by looking at the EKG they did while she was at the ER earlier in the week. He called her condition “SVT”. In SVT, supraventricular tachycardia, the heart rate is sped up by an abnormal electrical impulse starting in the atria. The heart beats so fast that the heart muscle cannot relax between beats. When the chambers don’t relax, they cannot contract strongly or fill with enough blood to meet the body’s needs. Because the heart can’t contract the way it should, the brain may not receive enough blood and oxygen. It can make her feel light in the head, dizzy, or feel like her heart is racing or pounding. He says it will happen again but there is no knowing when. When she has an episode we can do physical maneuvers to help stop the rapid rate like holding her breath and bearing down, gagging her, or dunking her head in ice cold water. We can try to stop it by ourselves for up to 2 hours before heading to an ER for medicine. If the episodes become more frequent or more bothersome we can put Dahlia on medication or schedule radiofrequency ablation, a surgical procedure that uses catheters to destroy the tissue that causes the rapid heartbeat.
