Air date: June 21, 2009

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Many people experience an irregular or rapid heart beat. It's usually not a big deal ... but still worth checking out.

Jeremy Shere has more ...

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About a year and half ago, something started happening to my heart. I was exercising, lifting weights, and all of a sudden, without warning, my heart started racing ...

Just galloping out of control. A normal heartbeat goes something like this ...

It beats about 70 or 80 times a minute. When you exercise, of course, your heart beats faster. But my heart wasn't just speeding up a little bit. It was sprinting ...... really pounding inside my chest ... taking my breath away ...

A little freaked out--actually a lot freaked out--I did what we all do these days when confronted with a medical problem: a got online and did a Google search for "fast heartbeat." And pretty soon I made my way to a website called DoctorsVideos.com. I found a clip of Michael La Corte, MD, talking about something called tachycardia.

You understand this is really very very simple. There are two kinds of rapid heart beat. Very simply there's the normal type of rapid heart beat that's called sinus tachycardia ...

Sinus tachycardia, Doctor La Corte explains, is what happens when you have a fever, or you're scared, or you're running--your heart speeds up, and that's normal. But not all rapid heart beats are normal ...

Rarely, you can have what's called an abnormal circuit in the heart, it's an electrical short circuit that fires for some unexplained reason and causes a very very rapid heartbeat, and that's called supraventricular tachycardia.

Supraventricular tachycardia ... that did not sound good. It sounded scary. And after seeing a cardiologist and walking around with a portable heart monitor, it turned out that that's what I had. Long story short, I decided to have a procedure called a catheter ablation, to get rid of my heart's abnormal circuit, and solve the problem. It went well ... for the most part ... but as I found out, any time you're dealing with the heart, things can wrong.

I'll save that story for another segment.

I'm Jeremy Shere

Additional Resources:

• Learn more about tachychardia

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