In May 2022, Bryce De Witt, then 35, felt his heart flutter rapidly, what he recognized as a heart palpation. Two months later, he fainted and went to a local hospital.
Doctors there found that he had a low heart rate but dismissed his concerns and sent him home.
After that, he started “passing out more frequently, and my symptoms (were) getting significantly worse,” De Witt, 37, from Foresthill, California, tells TODAY.com. He went to two more hospitals that year for his heart palpitations and other symptoms but was always dismissed.
“We were becoming incredibly frustrated,” he recalls. “They’re like … ‘You’re 35, you’re healthy, have a great day.’”
Eventually, De Witt, an Air Force veteran, visited his local VA hospital, where a doctor realized he needed a pacemaker. Since getting one, De Witt has been able to enjoy life with his four children and work as an emergency room technician while attending nursing school.
“I am able to play with my kids. I am able to do yard work, and everything feels like it’s returned basically back to normal,” he says. “I’m grateful for it.”
Heart palpitations, slow heart rate
In April 2022, De Witt left the Air Force and began civilian life. A month later, he noticed heart palpitations, when it feels like your heart is beating too fast, which caused him to worry.
“Something just didn’t feel right at that point,” he says. “Something felt very off to me.”
In July, he passed out suddenly.
“We went down to the hospital locally, and my heart rate was incredibly low,” De Witt says. “I’m like, ‘I wonder if I’ll end up needing a pacemaker.’”
De Witt had some medical training, and he realized he was experiencing bradycardia, a heart rate lower than 60 beats per minute, according to the American Heart Association. A normal heart rate is anything from 60 to 100 beats per minute with some exceptions, according to the organization.
But he was sent home after a night in the hospital.
After that, he started having regular episodes where he felt dizzy, tired or heart palpitations, signs his bradycardia was becoming more pesistent. De Witt thought he might need a pacemaker, but when he visited the emergency room, doctors sent him home again and told him to follow up with a specialist.
“I was constantly kicked down the road,” De Witt says. “I was passed off to the next provider, and we really weren’t going anywhere.”
“It was probably the way I looked physically and my age,” he adds. “I came from a very strenuous career, very physically fit.” He also did CrossFit prior to his heart problems, and doctors couldn’t identify a cause of his bradycardia episodes.
De Witt’s health worsened. He couldn’t exercise or even play with his children because he felt so exhausted.
“I would go hiking. I’d fish with the kids. I’d go camping or always taking a road trip,” he says. “All of a sudden, I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t work and I couldn’t even go outside and do the things that I like like playing with my kids or my dog. I was a couch potato.”
Then he began experiencing shortness of breath, which came with another scary symptom.
“I was having crushing chest pain,” he explains. “We thought one day I’m just not going to be here anymore.”
While De Witt continued visiting doctors and the hospital, he struggled to receive interventions. He felt like giving up. Then in March 2023, he became ill at a birthday party. He felt very weak and dizzy.
De Witt’s friend encouraged him to visit the nearby VA hospital. At first, De Witt balked.
“I said, ‘Well, I don’t want to go to the hospital. I’ve been in and out of so many different hospitals and nothing has worked,” he recalls. “She said, ‘Well, you owe it to yourself and your kids to get another opinion.’”
After some more convincing, De Witt agreed to go to the nearby San Francisco VA Medical Center. At the time, his heart rate was between 20 to 30 beats per minute.
“I was very dizzy, and they took it very seriously,” De Witt says. “They ended up admitting me to the hospital, (but) this was all par for the course when I’ve been admitted to the hospital numerous times.”
The hospital released De Witt the next day and noted that an electrophysiologist, a doctor who specializes in treating the heart’s electrical system, would reach out to him. “I’ve been told this multiple times before, so I was just like, ‘OK here we go again,’” he says.
The morning after discharge, De Witt’s phone rang, and it was Dr. Liong Bing Liem, a cardiac electrophysiologist from San Francisco VA Medical Center.
“He said, ‘Hi, I read your file. I don’t have any questions. You need a pacemaker,’” De Witt says. “I was like, ‘What just happened?’”
De Witt felt stunned that someone finally wanted him to have a pacemaker after he had been asking for help for so long.
“For Dr. Liem to automatically validate everything I have been trying to say in the past year, it was a very overwhelming feeling,” De Witt recalls.
Treating slow heart rate
When Liem examined De Witt’s medical files, he knew that the Air Force veteran needed a pacemaker even though he was “young and healthy,” Liem explains.
“Doctors would look at him and say, ‘Come on now, there’s no way you’re going to need a pacemaker,’” Liem, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, tells TODAY.com. “He had an abnormally slow heart. We don’t know why or what is causing that, but he definitely needed a pacemaker. And when I saw him, that’s what I said. ‘You needed a pacemaker a year ago.’”
Almost immediately, Liem could tell De Witt felt relieved by this assessment.
“He was very grateful that he was finally referred to me,” Liem says.
Liem believed De Witt would benefit from having AVEIR dual chamber leadless pacemaker, which would help his heart when its rate dipped too low.
“A pacemaker is an implanted device that (tracks) the patient’s heart rate, and when it senses the heart rate below a certain programmable number — that’s usually either 50 or 60 — then it would stimulate the heart’s electrical signal to make the heart beat,” he says.
De Witt was the youngest patient in the VA system to receive a wireless, dual chamber pacemaker, Liem notes. A pacemaker without wires has “lots of advantages” over traditional pacemakers.
“If you put wires into a patient’s body for a traditional pacemaker, you have to make a small cut under the collarbone and find the vein (and) insert the wire through that into the heart,” Liem says.
The wires themselves last about 25 years, so with a younger patient like De Witt, a pacemaker with wires would likely need to them replaced at least once, and that could be risky procedure for him.
“You have to cut through the tissue of the blood vessel in the heart for lead extraction,” Liem says. “Leadless pacemakers were invented to replace that potential issue.”
‘Go seek answers’
De Witt received his pacemaker in two stages. He had the first pacemaker inserted in the lower chamber of his heart in May 2023 and the second one placed in the upper chamber of his heart in January 2024.
“When I came out of (the second) surgery, I felt like everything was just back to normal,” De Witt says.
Doctors are unsure why De Witt experienced bradycardia, chest pain and fainting, but the symptoms started after he had a COVID-19 infection.
“That looks like that may have been a trigger for it,” De Witt says.
Slowly, he began exercising again and now he’s back to his full gym routine. While he works as an ER tech, he’s also in nursing school. He’s again enjoying the activities he loves, such as playing with his children and hiking. His experience felt “humbling,” he says.
“I went from being the breadwinner of the family to really needing to rely on others. It really put a lot of things into perspective for what was really important to me.”
Grappling with a mysterious health condition and seeking help also taught De Witt how to speak up for himself.
“I learned to advocate for myself, and by doing that I learned how to advocate for others, too,” he says. “Throughout my illness, I was misdiagnosed, basically put on a shelf and we kept pushing. … Go, seek answers. You owe it to yourself.”
CORRECTION (July 3, 2024, 12:25 p.m. ET): A previous version misspelled Dr. Liem’s last name and the town name Foresthill, California, and stated the order of De Witt’s surgeries incorrectly. These errors have since been corrected.
This article was originally published on TODAY.com
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