A heartbeat of a thousand stories

It started with me always being tired as a teenager. People found it very strange. I was always sleeping, and I always thought there was something wrong with my heart because I had so many episodes that felt like “heart attacks.”

The doctor always told me it was stress, so I was given medication for it. But the medication only made me more tired, and I always felt like I was misdiagnosed.

Later, I went to nursing school. At my first job for school, I fainted because I was standing too long on my feet. That was my first really bad experience. After that, I had a few hospital visits because of high heart rates and extreme tiredness. Again, they just said it was stress—or nothing at all.

I took medication for years for stress, but nothing worked. So, I started doing research myself because I had so many bad symptoms all the time: presyncope, dizziness when standing, and always having a high heart rate. I never did the things other teenagers did because I just couldn’t with POTS.

Finally, after begging for more tests, they found out I had POTS. Now I finally have the medication I need, and I know what to do if I have a “POTS attack.”

That’s my story. I feel that POTS is misunderstood because people always tell me it’s not that bad. But every day, I struggle with simple things, because everything is so much harder than before I developed POTS.