Back in the Saddle with a New Heart: Jessica’s ACM Story

SADS.org - Full Story

By Jessica V. and the SADS Foundation
Published December 2, 2025

Jessica swings into the saddle and heads out with her daughter for a 50-mile endurance horseback ride. From the outside, it might look like any other long-distance ride – but Jessica is doing it with a new heart after surviving cardiac arrest and years of misdiagnoses.

“Something’s wrong with my heart”

Jessica’s earliest memories of her heart go back to childhood. At nine years old, lying in bed at night, she could hear and feel her heart “skipping beats” in her ear. Her mom, an ER nurse, took her to the doctor. They did tests and told her family she had premature ventricular contractions (or PVCs) – extra beats that were brushed off as a “normal abnormality.”

“I’ll never forget that phrasing – what the heck is a normal abnormality?” says Jessica.

Assured by her doctor that everything was fine, Jessica became a track star, played soccer and tennis, earned her black belt, and competed in Taekwondo tournaments. In her teens and early adulthood, she started fainting. Once, she passed out while teaching a kickboxing class. As she went into college, she had episodes of tunnel vision and blacking out. Eventually she was told she was having panic attacks.

“For years I was told it was panic attacks. Deep down I knew something was really wrong with my heart.”

She accepted the diagnosis and kept going – even as her symptoms continued, and started to get worse.

After college, Jessica worked at a law firm in California. Her symptoms were getting harder to ignore. She was blacking out at her desk. She felt constantly exhausted, sometimes even nodding off in the car on the way home from work. Then one day, she simply couldn’t wake up fully. She dragged herself to the ER with a friend, complaining of chest pain, shortness of breath, and a racing heart.

She sat in the ER for about an hour and a half before anyone ran an EKG.

“When they finally did, everything changed,” she says. The ER staff realized she was in ventricular tachycardia (V-tach) – an extremely dangerous, fast heartbeat – with lots of PVCs and ectopy (extra or skipped heartbeats that disrupt the normal rhythm). Suddenly, the doctors were panicking...

Read more here:
https://sads.org/blog-cat/back-in-the-saddle-with-a-new-heart-jessicas-acm-story/