I was sending emails back and forth lately with someone who suffers with a lot of PVCs every day, trying to help her to cope with them. The things she was feeling as her heart was flip-flopping in her chest read like it came straight from my own head.

You ask yourself "Can I die from PVCs? How will my family go on without me?"

It can be a constant reminder that something is wrong. And I mean every few seconds, all day long constant. But now, a little over 10 years since I had mt first PVC, and almost three years since I was having 10,000+ PVCs every single day for eight months, I'm able to cope with it far better than I did when I only had a few in a day.

And it was that really awful time in 2006, when as much as 20% of my heartbeats were PVCs, that gives me strength now. I had what most anyone would consider a lot of PVCs, for a long time, and they didn't kill me. Didn't even make me take a nap at an inappropriate time. I never felt weak or short of breath, even while working my physically demanding job.

And now that I've put nearly three years of distance between myself and that period, I'm even stronger for it, because if I have a string of incessant PVCs for a few days, I remember that I had that for 8 months straight, and when they subsided I was PVC free for months afterward, and in general, the last three years since then I've only had 50 or so "bad" days.

If there was some way I could convince someone that they really didn't need to worry about their PVCs, I'd do it. But I think that ultimately only you can convince yourself that you won't die from your skipped heartbeats. And you can only do that after you've had them for awhile, in lots of different situations and lived to tell about it.

Until then, I'll be here to lend a shoulder.