My heart failed last week (Thursday, June 29th, 2017 at about 5:30pm). My ICD saved my life. This is the story of what happened, why it happened, and how I survived.

TLDR; If you’ve noticed any irregular heart rhythms in your own chest especially if that rhythm made you light headed, dizzy, or feel in any way out of whack: tell your doctor about it and get it checked out! Heart rhythm problems can lead to sudden cardiac death and way too often that death is the first sign anything is wrong. If you are experiencing symptoms you are lucky because you have a chance to do something about it, so do it!

At about 5:30 in the evening last Thursday my heart failed. More precisely, it went into Ventricular Fibrillation. VFib is bad. It basically means that my heart was quivering unproductively and not pumping blood. If untreated it will lead to death. In my case, my ICD detected the bad heart rhythm and shocked my heart back into usefulness. It saved my life. I am so glad that I have my ICD. In the five years since it was implanted it had yet to be used for anything more than a heart monitor. Now, I know just how useful this thing is.

One complication of this incident was the fact that once the device had shocked me it left my heart in a productive but troubling rhythm called Atrial Fibrillation. Afib can be life threatening but mine was just debilitating and sustained. The doctors tried some anti-arrhythmia medication but that did not work. As a result less thank 24 hours after my original shock I was given another, controlled shock to “reset” my heart rhythm. This is called “cardioversion”.