Jessika Seward, then 22, felt a jolt of pain in her chest while working an overnight shift as a cardiac nurse in April 2023. At first, she brushed it off. But the pangs continued for a half hour and a co-worker urged her to seek help.
After numerous tests, Seward learned that she needed an intervention for a slow heartbeat. “I just started sobbing. They’re like, ‘No, no, you’re OK,’” Seward, now 23, of Dayton, Ohio, tells TODAY.
com. “I had a gut feeling that meant I was probably going to need a pacemaker.” Seward had known for some time that there was something different about her heart.
As a college soccer player, she underwent a physical and an EKG to make sure she was healthy enough. During her EKG doctors discovered she had a first-degree heart block. A heart block occurs when something prevents the heart’s electrical system, also known as the conduction system, from working correctly, says Dr.
Robert Kowal, a cardiac electrophysiologist and general manager of cardiac pacing therapies at Medtronic. People can have a first-, second- or third- degree heart block. The first is the least severe while the third is the most severe.
Doctors never uncovered why Seward had one at such a young age. “The general consensus is that it’s probably a genetic thing I was born with, and they just happened to find it,” Seward says. “People can go their whole life with a first-degree heart block and never have any symptoms.
” But Seward developed signs of heart block, including shortness of breath when exercising, feeling tired often and experiencing numbness in her hands and feet. Sometimes after working out or practice she felt like she “was going to die.” Still, she didn't worry about it and didn't bring it up to doctors.
“Part of me just didn’t want to accept there was something wrong and that it was probably worse than when I knew,” she says. When the pain struck during work, Seward visited the emergency room. Doctors performed three EKGs within a short period of time because they were not expecting that someone so young would have what was now a second-degree heart block.
Even though they admitted her, they released her the next day because “there wasn’t anything they could do.” Still, she followed up with a doctor who recommended a sedated electrophysiology study, a series of tests that examines the heart’s electrical system. During that, the doctor said he would perform a cardiac ablation, a procedure using catheters to apply heat or cold to the heart to repair its abnormal beating, according to .
The doctor hoped it would address her issues. “I remember waking up and asking, ‘Were they able to do the ablation,’” she recalls. “(The doctor) was like, ‘We weren’t able to do that.
’” They admitted Seward to the hospital to do more tests to determine the cause of the heart block. But they couldn’t find anything and they soon recommended simply treating it with a pacemaker. “The doctor was like, ‘I don’t know what’s causing this but .
.. you can either wait on some more scans or you can go ahead and get a pacemaker,’” she says.
“I was like, ‘Yeah, let’s just go ahead and do it.’” At that point, Seward suspected the doctors would not find an underlying cause and she'd ultimately need a pacemaker anyway. To understand how the heart works, Kowal thinks of a car.
Much like a car has an electrical system that powers the motor's cylinders to work together, the heart has an electrical system that helps all the chambers pump simultaneously. “(The heart's conduction system) is really responsible for doing two things. One, making sure that your heart rate — the speed at which it beats — is appropriate to what you’re doing,” he tells TODAY.
com. “The other thing it does is help make sure all those chambers beat (in) coordination.” When someone experiences a heart block, something thwarts the electrical signals so the chambers struggle to communicate to pump normally.
In Seward’s case, her heart couldn’t keep up. “The heart was going too slow because some of these signals are getting blocked between the chambers,” he says. In many cases, a mild heart block never progresses.
“The vast majority of people who have first-degree heart block never go on to have anything,” Kowal says. “You just have to watch and see particularly (with) someone who’s as young as her.” For most people, a heart block “is part of the aging process,” but young people can develop one, too.
People with a family history of heart blocks might experience one when they are younger or others can develop it from something like a Lyme infection, in rare cases. The latter goes away when you treat the underlying Lyme disease, Kowal notes. Sometimes in young people with heart block it can be “a little harder for us to pin down,” the cause, Kowal says.
People with heart block often experience symptoms including: “Chest pain is actually a very uncommon manifestation of this,” Kowal says. “So (Seward) is a bit atypical in that she’s young and she presented in a little bit of a different way.” Treating a heart block often requires a pacemaker unless it is a “reversible type,” such as Lyme disease-caused heart block, Kowal says.
. “Think of a pacemaker like a fancy clock,” he says. “It sits under the skin in the chest and from there, there are two wires that go into the heart and they basically watch the heartbeat.
If it sees a heartbeat, let’s say every second, which would be 60 beats per minute, it does absolutely nothing.” When the heart struggles to beat regularly the pacemaker will send a slight jolt to “reestablish the normal heartbeat." Kowal says it works so seamlessly that people rarely notice they have one.
When Seward woke after having her pacemaker implanted, she felt a difference. Her recovery was quick and she only needed to take off a month from work. After that, doctors told her to “live life how you normally would.
” Sometimes she forgets she has it until she sees a scar. It transformed her life and she can better enjoy hikes and activities with her dogs. “Pretty early on I started to notice I wasn’t getting (shortness) of breath.
I didn’t get tired,” she says. “I could work out for way longer without feeling like I was going to die, which sounds traumatic.” Having a pacemaker also gives her “peace of mind” and stops Seward from worrying about her heart.
“It’s kind of a blessing in disguise,” she says. “It’s given me a lot of cool opportunities to educate patients that I have who might be getting pacemakers and I feel like eventually it might be a career path I might take.” Seward wanted to share her story to encourage others to “being their own advocates” and “keep pushing for answers.
” “You know your body best,” she says. “(My experience) has given me a way to help educate other people.” Meghan Holohan is a digital health reporter for TODAY.
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