Launched in early 2009, SkippingHearts.com was created by Jeff Pozniak and Jodie French to bridge the communication gap between the medical profession and the average person when it comes to arrhythmia issues.
Jeff has been living with mild arrhythmia for more than ten years. In early 1999, after a Mountain Dew bender and 90 minutes in the weight room, he experienced skipped beats for the very first time. Nervously he called his family doctor who scheduled a Holter monitor and stress test. He was subsequently diagnosed as having PVCs and told that it was benign, normal and that he should just get used to them.
In the years following the diagnosis he spent time alternating between having periods of frequent PVCs and periods of no PVCs at all. In 2006 he suffered with PVCs every 5-6 heartbeats, all day, every day, for 10 months straight. He was pretty sure 2006 would be his final year.
Jeff’s misplaced anxiety notwithstanding, he’s alive and well in 2009, suffering from infrequent bouts with PVCs, PACs and PAT/PSVT, and continues to live life free of antiarrhythmia medications. (Just don’t ask him about anti-anxiety medications.) With the help of Jodie, Jeff launched this site in the hopes of quelling the nerves of arrhythmia sufferers by making complex medical studies and terminology accessible to regular people. “I want people to be able to walk into their doctor’s offices armed with accurate information so that they can ask the right questions. And just having medical information broken down into understandable terms can do a lot to reduce the anxiety many of us have about our arrhythmia. Not knowing what’s wrong can be so much worse than knowing.”
Jodie French is a 40-something wife and mother to one daughter. You could say she is a lifelong heart patient. Her heart troubles started at age 16, lying in bed while experiencing her first attack of PAT. After that first episode, with her heart racing along at 220bpm, she couldn’t help but turn her attention inward, toward that anxious muscle inside her chest. Several weeks later, after the usual run of tests, she was diagnosed as having anxiety. It would be several more years before she would be diagnosed with PAC, PVC and PAT. Since then she’s visited her cardiologist once a year and taken a small dose of Atenolol daily.
Now in her 40’s, Jodie still experiences bouts of pvc’s, pac’s, and pat, and can still be shaken by a sudden onset of her arrhythmia, 20+ years later.
Being “symptomatic experts” in what it feels like to have these arrhythmia and how they can take the life right out of living, Jodie and Jeff hope to provide the medical knowledge and personal reassurance needed early on so that others don’t have to go through years of panic over these conditions.
