By Becca Healy

The next instalment of the Chronic Illness series features an interview with Emily Horsley on their experiences living with POTS.

I spoke to Emily Horsley about their experience with POT. POTS stands for postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. On a basic level, it is when your heart rate increases after rising from a sitting or standing position. This can cause dizziness and fainting. As all chronic illnesses do, it affects people in different ways and has other symptoms that affect the everyday life of the sufferer. There is no cure.

I first asked what POTS means to them. “In technical terms. It means the body can’t cope with change. The main symptom is your heart doesn’t understand going from sitting to standing or lying to standing”.

Only recently diagnosed in the past two years, they’d always had a history of fainting. One memorable faint was at a school disco during a cha cha slide! But fainting is only on the one extreme end of the symptoms.

“I collapsed at a restaurant family dinner and that led me to get diagnosed with POTS. I’ve only fainted once since being properly diagnosed with it. Day to day, there is a general sense of dizziness, heart palpitations and chest pains. It is often fobbed off as anxiety as it has similar symptoms of fluttery heart sensations and feeling hot.”

They had no idea what it was until their GP suggested they might have POTS. The symptoms were so extreme that they thought they may have had a seizure. I asked them to describe how fainting feels.

“‘Everything goes TV static and sit there and wait until you come back to life. You have no control. You feel yourself slip away.”

They said having POTS affects ‘everything in my life really” and drew attention to a little-known symptom of gastrointestinal issues that occur from the change of sitting to standing. During periods of viral illness or menstruation, symptoms get worse for POTS sufferers. People with POTS are generally those born female. Emily told me of a strange comment from a Doctor, saying their POTS may get better if they had a baby!

At first diagnosis, Emily was scared to go out and face the world and expressed the isolation they experience with living with this condition. Now they are more used to it, but joked that they just hope they don’t faint of a first date!

Treatment for the condition can include medication such as Ivabradine, which works to slow the heart rate down. This unfortunately didn’t help Emily and they now focus on having a healthy lifestyle by incorporating eating healthily and scheduling in time to do gentle exercise such as swimming and walking.

Similarly to our last spotlight on chronic illness, Emily advises those who believe they may have POTS to make sure that they advocate for themselves in medical appointments. It took them just under a year to be diagnosed with the condition.

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