Strange Sensation Woke Me at 3AM—Now I’m Waiting for a Heart Transplant
Newsweek · C · trust 46/100
0 Share Newsweek is a Trust Project member See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. My husband Cody and I with our daughter, Lilah, finally moved out of my in-laws’ home and into our own place in the mountains, and life felt like it was finally falling into place. It was my dream home and the perfect place to raise our family.
About a month later, everything changed.
One night, I woke up at around 3 a.m. with a strange tingling sensation in my left arm. It wasn’t painful, just uncomfortable. At first, I assumed I’d slept on it wrong. But something didn’t feel right. I wasn’t even lying on that side.
After about an hour, I woke my husband and we went to the emergency room .
Doctors ran tests, including an electrocardiogram, but when it showed nothing concerning, they sent me home. I was only 24, healthy and active.
A couple of hours later, my mom called. The hospital had contacted her, as she was my emergency contact, and they couldn’t get hold of me. They told her that I needed to return immediately.
My blood work had come back. A troponin test, which measures proteins released when the heart muscle is damaged, showed elevated levels. Doctors suspected I had suffered a heart attack .
I was also four weeks pregnant with my son Brayden, now 10, which meant doctors couldn’t perform all the tests they normally would. They offered me a termination, but I declined.
The best explanation at the time was that a virus during pregnancy may have contributed to the heart attack. I spent four days in hospital as my troponin levels continued to rise and fall.
Months of appointments and hospital visits followed before I was diagnosed with dilated cardiomyopathy, a condition that causes the heart to enlarge and struggle to pump blood effectively.
As my pregnancy progressed, I experienced chest pain and repeated hospital admissions and an echocardiogram had revealed I had another symptomless heart attack during the pregnancy.
Doctors became increasingly concerned and eventually told me I likely would not survive a full-term pregnancy.
Brayden was delivered by C-section at around 32 weeks in May 2016.
A few months later, doctors implanted a subcutaneous implantable cardioverter-defibrillator beneath the skin on the side of my chest. A device designed to prevent sudden cardiac arrest.
For years, I managed my condition. Then, in June 2022, while on a girls’ trip, I was dancing when it felt like someone had rammed into my back.
My defibrillator had fired. Soon afterward, it fired again in the emergency room, then a third time as my heart rate climbed above 200 beats per minute.
The closest comparison I can give is being kicked in the chest by a horse.
Doctors sedated me and shocked my heart back into rhythm. When I woke up, they told me I had experienced supraventricular tachycardia, a condition that causes episodes of abnormally fast heart rhythms.
They also told me something I’ll never forget: if my device hadn’t worked, my heart likely would have given out.
Just days later, the defibrillator went off again. Because of ongoing rhythm problems, doctors replaced it with a traditional implantable defibrillator and pacemaker combination and started me on stronger medication.
A year later, during my vow renewal, we had our first dance and then an upbeat song followed and the defibrillator went off, followed by four more times after.
I was terrified and genuinely thought I was going to die in front of my family and friends.
Over time, the damage worsened. My ejection fraction, which measures how well the heart pumps blood, dropped to just 18 percent. A healthy adult typically has an ejection fraction of around 50 to 70 percent.
Doctors also found significant scarring on the left side of my heart.
By 2024, my cardiologist told me I was in heart failure and referred me to a transplant specialist.
Genetic testing later revealed I carried a rare inherited FLNC gene variant, which can weaken and scar the heart muscle, increasing the risk of cardiomyopathy, heart failure and dangerous abnormal heart rhythms.
The discovery explained why my condition developed and why it can never be fully fixed. It also meant both of my children have a 50 percent chance of carrying the variant.
In March 2026, I was officially placed on the heart transplant list.
Today, my quality of life looks nothing like it once did. Some days I can walk around the block; other days I need a wheelchair just to get into a store. The fatigue, dizziness, brain fog and chest pain are relentless, and no amount of sleep makes them better.
II recently stopped working as an analyst because my symptoms became too severe.
Now I keep my phone beside me at all times, waiting for the call that could save my life.
One thing this journey has taught me is how little many people understand about heart disease. I certainly didn’t know that it was one of the leading causes of deaths for men and women.
I had no warning signs. No obvious symptoms. No reason to think anything was wrong.
Then one night, my arm started tingling, and my life changed forever.
Jasmine Irsik is a 35-year-old from Eastvale, California, who regularly shares her story on TikTok (@jnicoleee91) to raise awareness of heart failure.
Newsweek’s reporters and editors used Martyn, our AI assistant, to produce this story. Learn more about Martyn here .
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Sirena Bergman and Paul Donnelley .
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