La La Anthony is speaking up about a recent health scare she experienced earlier this summer.
During a recent cover story for Self, the “Power” alumn revealed she was diagnosed with premature ventricular contractions, a type of abnormal heartbeat, in 2019. Two years after that diagnosis, on the day after her Memorial Day family barbecue the 39-year-old says she started to feel so lightheaded she used a refrigerator in her kitchen to balance herself. Anthony said she “never felt anything like that before.”
Sweating and heart racing, her cousins and her 14-year-old son Kiyan, whom she shares with estranged husband and Los Angeles Lakers addition Carmelo Anthony, convinced her to seek medical assistance. She was rushed to a nearby hospital, and upon arrival she was told she would need to have a heart procedure — something she admittedly had been avoiding.
“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,” the Brooklyn native 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.’ You know, we, especially Black people, like to self-diagnose. We got all the answers.”
The surgery took two hours, during which a catheter was inserted into her heart via her groin. The star said she experienced some “scary moments” when she awakened partway through out the procedure.
“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.”
According to the Mayo Clinic, those fluttering feelings or skipped beats in your chest are caused by beats disrupting your regular heart rhythm. Furthermore, having frequent PVCs might increase your risk of developing heart rhythm problems or weakening of the heart muscle.
Before her surgery Anthony’s symptoms had become too apparent to ignore. “I started feeling it even more — like this fluttering and this racing all the time,” she recalled. “I was like, ‘What is going on?’” The actress revealed her EKG showed she was having “about 25 percent more heartbeats over the course of the day than the average person.”
Following the surgery the “BMF” actress stayed in the hospital for four days while she recovered. She now is also more cautious about her health and goes for a checkup every two months.
