La La Anthony Reveals She Needed Emergency Surgery to Fix a Heart Condition: ‘It Was a Terrifying Experience’
In a new interview with SELF, La La Anthony opens up about her health and reveals that she had emergency surgery earlier this year to correct a longtime heart condition.
The 39-year-old actress revealed that she struggled with PVCs, or premature ventricular contractions — extra heartbeats that cause the heart to overwork. Anthony was formally diagnosed in 2019, when a doctor determined that she had around 25% more heartbeats a day than the average person. LaLa explained that she had been dealing with this for years until June when she finally addressed it after putting it on hold to focus on her career.
She explained, “I felt my heart racing all the time, but because it’s all I ever really knew, I didn’t even know that it was necessarily something wrong,” she told writer Evette Dionnei for the magazine’s November digital cover. “I just thought, ‘Oh, you just feel your heart racing sometimes because you’re working too much, you haven’t slept, you’re stressed.’ You know, we, especially Black people, like to self-diagnose. We got all the answers.”
She added, “They were very, very concerned,” she said. “Within a 24-hour period, they said, my heart was beating 30,000 extra beats more than the average person. It was going fast constantly.… Your heart is a muscle. If a muscle is working so hard all the time, eventually the muscle will get weak and cause heart attack, stroke, death, whatever it is.”
The wake-up call for her was in June of this year, when Anthony was lightheaded and couldn’t even stand without help. From there, her family convinced her to call an ambulance.
“I never felt anything like that before,” she said, adding that her 14-year-old son Kiyan insisted that she get help. “Kiyan was like, ‘Mom, please let them call because you don’t look like yourself.’ ”
Even then, Lala wasn’t trying to go the hospital but recalls an EMT saying, “‘If you were my sister, I would say you have to go right now.’ ”
“Had it not happened [as an emergency],” Anthony added, “I probably would have still just been continuing to put it off, put it off, put it off.”
A 2-hour cardiac ablation was performed on her, eliminating at the part of the heart that causes the abnormal heartbeat. “They would wake me up during the procedure and say, ‘We’re going to speed your heart up now…. Just take deep breaths,’ ” she recalled. “Those doctors were just so incredible. But it was a terrifying experience.”
Her reason for sharing this story now?:
“Life is short. We’ve learned that from the pandemic. We learned that from being in quarantine. You want to be able to live it to the fullest, and you don’t want something that can easily be corrected to be a reason why you’re not able to enjoy life or be there for your family or your friends,” she said. “Use me as an example of why not to wait.”
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