Kate Nash

Kate Nash

Kate Nash was 17, deciding between surgery and no surgery, and couldn't decide what to have for dinner

Content note — this story covers a subject some people would rather choose when to read.

Kate Nash had heart palpitations through her teens, and for a long time there was a reasonable explanation for them. She is asthmatic and used a reliever inhaler, which can cause palpitations, and her mother — a nurse — told her that was probably what it was. It was not an unreasonable thing to say. It was also wrong. What changed it was someone else nearly dying. A girl at her school became critically ill with a heart problem, and it shook the whole community. The next time Kate mentioned palpitations her mother felt her chest, found her heart racing, and took her straight to hospital. ECGs followed, and a diagnosis: supraventricular tachycardia. She was sixteen or seventeen, at the BRIT School, vaguely thinking about university. A doctor sat her down and gave her survival percentages, and what might happen later — a pacemaker, a stroke, a heart attack — and what the surgery involved, and left her to weigh the risk of having it against the risk of not. She describes being unable to decide what she wanted for dinner, let alone that. She says she numbed out. Her mother was furious with the doctor for putting statistics like that in front of a teenager. In the end she did not have to choose. She had been told that palpitations plus chest pain meant hospital. It happened at school, and her first instinct was to hide in a room and wonder whether she was making a fuss. A deputy head found her crying there and took her to A&E. Things got bad enough that the procedure was no longer optional. By then she had been rejected by every university she applied to and was working at a fast food chain. She took time off from that job to have heart surgery. She was awake for it — catheter ablation is done that way — and could feel the tubes moving up through her veins. What she remembers most sharply is not fear of dying but teenage mortification at being seen naked by a room of adults. Afterwards, lying alone in a hospital bed, still bloodied, she decided she was not going back to that job. Nothing here is medical advice. If your heart keeps racing like this, the NHS advice is to see a GP — and to call 999 if an episode lasts longer than usual or comes with chest pain, breathlessness or fainting.

• Supraventricular tachycardia (SVT)