I've had some type of arrhythmia off and on for about 35 years since age 9 along with fainting episodes sometimes with arrhythmia's sometimes completly unrelated - no rhyme or reason.
everything under the sun was blamed; drs said I did it for attention, not eating, stress, anxiety, not sleeping, gaining weight, exercising too much aging etc etc
I ignored it all my life and trusted dr's never thinking anything could be wrong with me. There wasn't anything I let interfere with what I wanted to do, when I had bad episodes or fainted I just waited till they were over or pushed through them.
I had my first EKG in Nov 2004 that showed nothing; not even palps even though I was having them daily and even during the test as well as shortness of breath and chest pain. Then I had another EKG in April 2007 that showed I was in bigeminy and some other minor things but I was told it was all "normal".
I broke my foot in June 2009 and my primary did a full exam. He heard what he thought were valve problems and pvc's and did 2 types of EKG's and sent me to a cardiologist.
Tons of testing later I found out I was having 50,000+ multifocal pvc's, VT runs and problems with my exercise stress test and I fainted. I saw 3 Ep's because the first one told me if I didn't have an ablation I would most likely go into heart failure but I didn't believe him; the 2nd one said my pvc's were no problem everyone gets them; here's a magic pill (Toprol) which put me in the ER, 3rd EP said yes they were a problem I needed an abltion.
I had the procedure done and found I had dangerous arrhythmia's (polymorphic VT) went into "VTach, VFib and VF arrest during the procedure. It wasn't until I had a cardiac cath they found what they thought was causing the problem (HOCM) and had to have a pacemaker/defibrillator implanted after ruling out ARVD/C.
I think the weirdest thing for me is to wrap my mind around the fact before abltion I had rare pac's/psvt and very frequent pvc's/vt but after ablation, my pvc's went away for awhile yet I developed quite a bit of pac's and psvt/svt then my pvc's/vt came back full force.
If you read in the dr's expert forums
http://www.medhelp.org/forums/Heart-Rhythm/show/91 http://www.medhelp.org/forums/Heart-Disease/show/114, you'll find the dr's say pvc's are nothing more than a nuisance until they become very numerous >15% daily or roughly 15,000 pvc's daily, then they may cause some problems.
VT (>3 pvc's in a row w/HR at least 100 bpm) most often occurs in the presence of demonstrable structural heart disease; but in structurally normal hearts it's usually benign and can be tolerated well even if it is scary to hear the word "VT" some use the word "VTach" which I wish they would remove from the medical dictionary =) it's just too often misunderstood.
Tachycardia rates between 110 and 150 may be tolerated even if sustained for minutes to hours. However, faster rates >180 beats per minute may cause drops in arterial pressure and produce syncope.
Very fast rates (>220) are imminently dangerous because they rarely terminate spontaneously and invariably cause drops in blood pressure and low cardiac output.
This is why it's important to have a full cardiac workup to check the structural parts of the heart just to be safe; have a complete blood workup including electrolytes and to find what may be the cause or triggers.