In May 2022, Bryce De Witt, then 35, felt his heart beating rapidly, which he recognized as a cardiac palpation. Two months later, he collapsed and went to a local hospital.
Doctors found his heart rate was weak, but ignored his concerns and sent him home.
After that, he began “fainting more frequently and my symptoms got significantly worse,” De Witt, 37, of Forest Hills, Calif., tells TODAY.com. He went to two other hospitals that year for his heart palpitations and other symptoms, but was always sent home.
“We were incredibly frustrated,” he recalls. “They were like, ‘You’re 35, you’re healthy, have a good day.’”
Eventually, De Witt, an Air Force veteran, went to the local Veterans Affairs hospital, where a doctor realized he needed a pacemaker. Since receiving one, De Witt has been able to enjoy life with his four children and work as an emergency room technician while attending school to become a nurse.
“I can play with my kids, I can do some gardening and I feel like everything is back to normal,” he said. “I’m grateful for that.”
Heart palpitations, slow heart rate
In April 2022, De Witt left the Air Force and began his civilian life. A month later, he noticed heart palpitations, or the feeling that his heart was beating too fast, which worried him.
“At that point, something was wrong,” he said. “I felt like something was very wrong.”
In July, he suddenly fainted.
“We went to the local hospital and my heart rate was incredibly low,” De Witt says. “I thought, ‘I wonder if I’m going to need a pacemaker.’”
De Witt had medical training and realized he had bradycardia, a heart rate below 60 beats per minute, according to the American Heart Association. A normal heart rate is between 60 and 100 beats per minute, with some exceptions, the organization says.
But he was sent home after a night in hospital.
Eventually, he began having regular episodes of feeling dizzy, tired or having heart palpitations, signs that his bradycardia was becoming more persistent. De Witt thought he might need a pacemaker, but when he went to the emergency room, doctors sent him home and told him to see a specialist.
“I was constantly being passed around to other vendors,” De Witt says. “I was being passed around to another vendor, and we really had no chance of moving forward.”
“It was probably my physical appearance and my age,” he adds. “I had a very demanding career and I was in very good physical shape.” He also did CrossFit before his heart problems, and doctors couldn’t identify the cause of his bradycardia episodes.
De Witt’s health deteriorated. He could no longer exercise or even play with his children because he felt exhausted.
“I would go hiking. I would go fishing with the kids. I would go camping or I would always go on road trips,” he said. “All of a sudden, I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t work and I couldn’t even go out and do the things I love, like play with my kids or my dog. I was a couch potato.”
Then he began to feel short of breath, which was accompanied by another frightening symptom.
“I had crushing chest pain,” he says. “We thought one day I would not be here.”
As De Witt continued to see doctors and go to the hospital, he struggled to get interventions. He felt like giving up. Then, in March 2023, he became ill at a birthday party. He felt very weak and dizzy.
De Witt’s friend encouraged him to go to the nearby Veterans Affairs hospital. At first, De Witt hesitated.
“I told her, ‘I don’t want to go to the hospital. I’ve been to so many different hospitals and nothing has worked,’” he recalled. “She told me, ‘You owe it to yourself and your children to get another opinion.’”
After a little more persuasion, De Witt agreed to go to the San Francisco VA Medical Center. At the time, his heart rate was between 20 and 30 beats per minute.
“I was very dizzy and they took it very seriously,” De Witt said. “They eventually admitted me to the hospital, (but) it was completely normal because I’ve been in the hospital many times.”
The hospital released De Witt the next day and said an electrophysiologist, a doctor who specializes in treating the heart’s electrical system, would contact him. “I’ve been told this many times before, so I thought, ‘OK, here we go again,'” he said.
The morning after his discharge, De Witt’s phone rang: It was Dr. Liong Bing Leim, a cardiac electrophysiologist at the San Francisco VA Medical Center.
“He said, ‘Hello, I read your file. I have no questions. You need a pacemaker,’” De Witt said. “I was like, ‘What just happened?’”
De Witt was amazed that someone finally wanted him to have a pacemaker after he had been asking for help for so long.
“It was a very overwhelming feeling to have Dr. Leim automatically validate everything I had been trying to say over the past year,” De Witt recalls.
Treating slow heart rate
When Leim reviewed De Witt’s medical records, he knew the Air Force veteran needed a pacemaker even though he was “young and healthy,” Leim said.
“The doctors looked at him and said, ‘Come on, you’re not going to need a pacemaker,’” Leim, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, told TODAY.com. “His heart was abnormally slow. We don’t know why or what caused it, but he definitely needed a pacemaker. And when I saw him, that’s what I said. ‘You needed a pacemaker a year ago.’”
Almost immediately, Leim could see that De Witt felt relieved by this assessment.
“He was very grateful that he was finally referred to me,” Leim says.
Leim believed De Witt would benefit from an AVEIR dual-chamber wireless pacemaker, which would help his heart when his heart rate dropped too low.
“A pacemaker is an implanted device that monitors a patient’s heart rate and, when it detects that the heart rate is below a certain programmable number (usually 50 or 60), it stimulates the heart’s electrical signal to make it beat,” he explains.
De Witt is the youngest patient in the VA system to receive a dual-chamber, leadless pacemaker, Leim notes. A leadless pacemaker has “many advantages” over traditional pacemakers.
“If you’re putting wires into a patient’s body for a traditional pacemaker, you have to make a small incision under the collarbone and find the vein (and) insert the wire through that to the heart,” Leim says.
The wires themselves last about 25 years, so with a younger patient like De Witt, a pacemaker with wires would likely have to be replaced at least once, and that could be a risky procedure for him.
“To remove the leads, you have to cut the tissue of the heart’s blood vessels,” Leim explains. “Leadless pacemakers were invented to address this potential problem.”
“Go get answers”
De Witt received his pacemaker in two stages. The first was implanted in the upper chamber of his heart in May 2023 and the second in the lower chamber of his heart in January 2024.
“When I came out of the second operation, I felt like everything was back to normal,” De Witt says.
Doctors aren’t sure why De Witt suffered bradycardia, chest pain and fainting spells, but the symptoms began after he was infected with COVID-19.
“It seems like that may have been a trigger,” De Witt says.
Little by little, he started exercising again and is now back in his gym routine. In addition to working as an emergency room technician, he is taking nursing classes. He is enjoying the activities he loves again, like playing with his children and hiking. His experience has given him a certain “lesson in humility,” he says.
“I went from being the breadwinner to someone who really depends on others. It put a lot of things into perspective about what was really important to me.”
Struggling with a mysterious health issue and seeking help also taught De Witt to speak out.
“I learned to advocate for myself, and in the process I learned to advocate for others,” he says. “Throughout my illness, I was misdiagnosed, put on a shelf, and kept being pushed. (…) Go get answers. You owe it to yourself.”