Mandy LaChance is an active woman.
She and her husband like to walk through Midway Antique Mall and dance at the Blue Note, showing off their moves during ’80s and ’90s Decades Nights to hits like “Cha Cha Slide.”
She walks or bikes to work when the weather allows. And when it’s gray outside, or she wants a change of pace, Mandy likes walking the track or using the exercise machines at the ARC.
But for more than a year, her routine was thrown off by a dangerous heart rhythm disorder called ventricular tachycardia, or VT. Rapid, out-of-rhythm heartbeats from the heart’s two lower chambers can cause life-threatening low blood pressure levels as well as other symptoms.
“I’d get winded very easily, and my heart would start hurting,” she said. “Tiredness, passing out, falling. Nobody likes to fall. I couldn’t walk or run or dance.”
Mandy experienced the beginning stages of a heart attack in 2016 and had a pacemaker implanted. VT can be caused by scar tissue from heart attacks, and in 2023 Mandy was diagnosed with the condition.
She was forced to cut back on her hours at work because of the symptoms. And on multiple occasions, while walking her bike to the top of the hill as she left her neighborhood, the effort made her pass out.
“I would wake up in the grass with my bike on top of me, not knowing how I got there,” she said. “That’s a scary feeling because something happens and you have no recollection, no memory of how you got there. And it feels like there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Mandy’s diagnosis came after an urgent care visit, where her nurse said she needed to go to the ER. At University Hospital, Mandy passed out in the ER parking lot. That was the start of a two-week inpatient stay and her diagnosis.
One member of her care team was cardiac electrophysiologist Rahul Jain, MD, an expert in heart rhythm disorders like VT. As she recovered, Mandy decided he was someone she trusted to help resolve the heart issues that had knocked her life out of rhythm, too.
She wanted her independence back.
Before meeting with Jain, Mandy had been advised she needed a heart transplant. Her VT was not being safely managed and attempted treatments had not been successful, leading to repeat hospital admissions.
“Mandy told me she cried the day she was told she needed a transplant,” Jain said. “She wanted another opinion because she thought she was too young, and she was right.”
Jain requested a cardiac MRI to find exactly where the incorrect electrical signals in her heart were coming from. It turned out Mandy had two different tachycardias.
By guiding a tiny catheter with the ability to transmit radiofrequency energy through Mandy’s blood vessels to her heart, Jain ablated, or scarred, the abnormal heart tissue responsible for those dangerous rhythms.
“I was awake and talked to him while it was happening,” Mandy said. “He checked on me the whole time, and he’s the one who calls and checks on me still. I think he genuinely cares and knows who I am.”
Before treatment, Mandy’s implanted cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) showed more than five sustained episodes per day that required shocks, along with a similar number of temporary episodes that did not.
Since June of 2024, two months after Jain performed her second ablation, Mandy has had zero sustained VT episodes. She is also no longer taking medication to manage her heart rhythm.
“The biggest difference is that during her first visit, she was not an independent person,” Jain said. “The day I took her off her rhythm medication, that was the first clinic visit she came to by herself. She’s mobile, independent and able to do things without help. That makes me happy.”
Mandy was excited to get back to her old life with her own heart, including work. That track at the ARC is 6.5 laps per mile, and while it used to represent her limitations, it now reflects how far she’s come.
“I wanted to keep my independence and mobility,” Mandy said. “I’m feeling like I can do more.”