Earlier this year, WWE star Chelsea Green went public with the fact that she’d been diagnosed with a heart condition called supraventricular tachycardia. Sitting down with TMZ, Green detailed a decade-long ordeal before she was finally able to diagnose and treat the condition.
“I’ve had this … for the better part of my life,” she said. “I started trying to get answers on it in 2018, when I first got started in NXT. I carried around a heart monitor. I had it go off numerous times but we could never catch it. And that’s the problem with tachycardia; you have to be close to an EKG machine or something like that to be able to catch your heartrate going into overdrive.”
Based on information from the Mayo Clinic, SVT is a form of arrhythmia which can cause a person’s heart to begin beating much faster than normal. In most cases, people can live with SVT, and it can usually be remedied with a minor heart procedure. In rare cases, however, it can put one’s life at risk.
According to Green, while she did experience several “minor” instances of arrhythmia while wrestling, her SVT most often acted up when she was relaxing. After years of experiencing symptoms without answers, doctors were finally able to figure out what was happening when Green’s heart rate skyrocketed while doing a signing during the weekend of WWE WrestleMania.
“My heart rate jumped up to 228 beats per minute at a resting state, and it stayed like that for well over 10 minutes,” Green stated. “Because it was so long, we were able to get the paramedics to come and do an EKG, and that is basically how we finally were able to catch it and book emergency SVT ablation surgery.”
Chelsea Green explains heart ablation procedure she underwent
Going into further detail, Green explained that she’d visited many doctors over the years, each of whom offered different theories on what was affecting her heart rate, as well as advice on how to lower it. The wrestler found much of the advice did not work in practice. Instead, once every month or two, she would experience a highly-elevated heart rate that would eventually subside, but she worried that it could end her life.
“That was my fear,” she continued. “If it started in the ring, was it ever going to stop? And also, … your heart is a muscle, so your heart working at 228 beats per minute for over 10 minutes, that’s like sprinting.”
Because of her profession, Green felt she had to get her SVT taken care of, or she could risk suffering cardiac arrest in the ring. She had the heart ablation procedure less than a week after discovering what was wrong, and Green does not regret it. That’s despite having a somewhat traumatic experience, as she experienced some complications which resulted in the procedure taking longer than usual, and Green had to be awake for part of it. The WWE star encouraged others who are thinking about the surgery to still consider it.
“I feel better than I ever did before,” she said. “I’m not getting the tachycardia attacks the way I used to, so it’s a relief. … I wish I’d done this 10 [or] 15 years ago.”
If you use any quotes from this article, please credit TMZ and provide a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.
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