PYEONGCHANG, South Korea – Joanne Firesteel Reid remembers every burning minute of those seven hours.
“Because firstly, I was awake through both procedures,” she wrote, “and secondly because, you know, they saved my athletic career.”
Reid, a 25-year-old biathlete, said she almost blacked out at the penultimate World Cup stop of the 2016-17 season in Kontiolahti, Finland.
She was diagnosed with paroxysmal supraventricular tachycardia, which she then realized had been going on since 2014. Her heart would occasionally get stuck at 230 beats per minute for up to an hour straight.
“It’s not dangerous, actually, but what it does do is when your heart enters the tachycardia loop, the blood isn’t cycling correctly, so you’re not recovering as fast or maybe at all,” she said.