In a new interview for the November issue of Self magazine, La La Anthony revealed she underwent emergency heart surgery in June after she was diagnosed with premature ventricular contractions (PVCs).
“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,” Anthony said. “I just thought, ‘Oh, you just feel your heart racing sometimes because you’re working too much, you haven’t slept, you’re stressed.’”
It didn’t take long for La La’s symptoms to worsen. “I started feeling it even more — like this fluttering and this racingall the time,” she explained. “I was like, ‘What is going on?’”
A trip to the doctor’s office led to the discovery that she was having “about 25 percent more heartbeats over the course of the day than the average person.” Days after she was prescribed medicine to manage the illness, La La became lightheaded, turned pale, and nearly passed out. Hours later, she underwent a two-hour cardiac ablation.
“There were a lot of scary moments,” she says, when looking back at the emergency heart surgery. “They would wake me up during the procedure and say, ‘We’re going to speed your heart up now…. Just take deep breaths.’ Those doctors were just so incredible. But it was a terrifying experience.”
Anthony added, “The more I thought about it and actually talked to my son, he was just like, ‘Mom, like, it can actually help people out there to become aware of listening to their bodies.’ I can turn it into something that can actually help people out there and also make people understand, I’m human. I go through shit … it’s life.”
