When the Wolff Runs Away with Your Heart

My father is one in 20,000. One whose heart has the habit of getting away from him, of contracting offbeat. Wolff Parkinson White Syndrome cases are found in less than 20,000 US citizens per year and is only discovered through thorough heart exams or a presence of symptoms. My father's case was a more extreme one, born with an extra electrical pathway in his heart, when he grew anxious his heart beat had an extra dub in it. I remember him often having to lay on the ground and wait for his heart to slow and fix its own rhythm. Most children born with this condition never realize they have it simply due to the fact the extra electrode never fires. In the case of my father, he decided to have surgery done to remove the extra pathway. Inserting a small camera into a vein within his thigh, the surgeon traveled up to his heart, location the pacemaker cells of that specific electrical pathway and cauterized it. For the most part, his palpitations stopped, the electrode only trying to fire when he undergoes extreme anxiety but no longer causing an irregular heart beat. This syndrome is rarely fatal but I do have to say, the surgery helped my dad do the things he wanted to do like play baseball with us kids or ride his bicycle over twenty-five miles a day.