Heart-pounding episodes led woman to discover an electrical problem

Patricia Atiee woke up one night with her heart beating so rapidly that it terrified her. She was afraid to move and unsure what to think. The episode stopped after about a minute, but she was barely able to fall back asleep.

A week later, Atiee – then 24 – was driving with her dad when her heart began racing while at a stop light. When the light turned green, she pulled over. He asked if she needed to go to the hospital.

"No, I just need to let it pass," Atiee said.

A week later, it happened again while she was out with her sister in their hometown of San Antonio. They returned to her house and Atiee lay on the sofa. When she started to feel "very short of breath," her sister called an ambulance.

At the hospital, doctors diagnosed Atiee with a condition called Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome. It means she had an extra electrical pathway in her heart that was causing the rapid heartbeat. Sometimes, Atiee's heart raced over 200 beats per minute.

"It was just pound, pound, pound, pound, pound!" she said.

Today, her condition would commonly be treated with a minimally invasive procedure called an ablation. But this was 40 years ago. An ablation would have required open-heart surgery. Doctors first tried medication.

When the episodes continued, her family reached out to a doctor who was doing research on the heart's electrical system. He agreed to work with Atiee. In the cardiac catheterization lab, he mapped the faulty pathway, then administered different medicines to find one that stopped the irregular rhythm.

It was five years of trial and error with medication. At least three or four times a year, Atiee would rush to the hospital when her heart began pounding incessantly.

"I'd have an episode at work. I'd have an episode at the grocery store. I had an episode on the...