La La Anthony is on the mend after a major health scare this summer.
In a cover interview with Self magazine, posted Friday, Nov. 12, the 39-year-old TV personality and actress revealed that on June 1, she felt lightheaded and was rushed to the hospital for an emergency procedure to fix an irregular heartbeat. In 2019, during her days filming BH90210 in Vancouver, she had been officially diagnosed with premature ventricular contractions, or PVCs.
La La said her 14-year-old son Kiyan told her, "Mom, please let them call [an ambulance] because you don't look like yourself.'" When she got to the hospital, she underwent a catheter-based heart procedure called a cardiac ablation, which she had previously put off. She was hospitalized for four days.
"There were a lot of scary moments," she told Self. "They would wake me up during the procedure and say, 'We're going to speed your heart up now...just take deep breaths.'"
She added, "Those doctors were just so incredible. But it was a terrifying experience."
La La had experienced an irregular heartbeat for years before she was diagnosed in Canada, where she refused an examining physician's advice to go to an emergency room for further testing, opting instead to seek medical attention in her native United States after shooting on BH90210 had concluded.
"I felt my heart racing all the time, but because it's all I ever really knew, I didn't even know that it was necessarily something wrong," she told Self. "I just thought, Oh, you just feel your heart racing sometimes because you're working too much, you haven't slept, you're stressed. You know, we, especially Black people, like to self-diagnose. We got all the answers."
Back in New York, she underwent an electrocardiogram, or EKG, to measure her heart's electrical activity. The results were abnormal. Since undergoing her heart procedure, her EKGs have been normal.
La La had not revealed her heart condition or procedure until now. "The more I thought about it and actually talked to my son, he was just like, ‘Mom, like, it can actually help people out there to become aware of listening to their bodies,'" she told Self. "I can turn it into something that can actually help people out there and also make people understand, I'm human. I go through s--t…it's life."
She added, "Life is short. We've learned that from the pandemic. We learned that from being in quarantine. You want to be able to live it to the fullest, and you don't want something that can easily be corrected to be a reason why you're not able to enjoy life or be there for your family or your friends. Use me as an example of why not to wait."