La La Anthony reveals she went through a stressful and "terrifying experience" in her latest interview with Self Magazine, telling the outlet that she had to have emergency surgery for a heart condition. The Power actress shares that she'd been living with premature ventricular contractions, or extra heartbeats that cause the heart to overwork itself.

She'd avoided addressing the issue for some time as she focused on her career, but that changed for her on June 1. The star said she became so lightheaded that she couldn't stand without assistance and, upon suggestions from family, she decided to call for a doctor. 

"They were very, very concerned," she said. "Within a 24-hour period, they said, my heart was beating 30,000 extra beats more than the average person. It was going fast constantly.… Your heart is a muscle. If a muscle is working so hard all the time, eventually the muscle will get weak and cause heart attack, stroke, death, whatever it is."

Anthony was diagnosed by a doctor with PVCs in 2019 and was prescribed medication to stabilize her heartbeat. However, she stopped taking the medication because she says she didn't like how it made her feel "so tired and out of it." She decided instead to just self-monitor her stress levels. She also worried about the pending surgery she needed because of her fear of needles. 

"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 said in the magazine's November digital cover story. "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."

"I never felt anything like that before," she continued, adding that her 14-year-old son Kiyan was a contributing factor in her finally seeking medical attention. "Kiyan was like, 'Mom, please let them call because you don't look like yourself.'"

An unforgettable moment happened when she was loaded into an ambulance, she says. She realized how serious this condition was when one of the EMTs told her "'if you were my sister, I would say you have to go right now.'"

"Had it not happened [as an emergency]," Anthony added, "I probably would have still just been continuing to put it off, put it off, put it off."

According to People Magazine, doctors had to perform a cardiac ablation as soon as she was admitted to the hospital. The procedure involves surgeons having to cut out the part of the heart that causes the abnormal heartbeat. The patient also has to stay awake for the surgery.

"They would wake me up during the procedure and say, 'We're going to speed your heart up now…. Just take deep breaths,'" she remembered. "Those doctors were just so incredible. But it was a terrifying experience."

Anthony was released from the hospital after four days and is reportedly doing well after spending some time to heal. 

"Right after I had the ablation, they put me on the EKG, and I'm looking at the monitor," she continued. "And it's just steady and regular. I don't see a spike anywhere. It's so crazy. Just that quick. Everything kind of evened itself out and leveled out. To see that was like, 'Wow, that's all I had to do to get this s**t in order?' It's regular now."

Drawing on inspiration from the pandemic, Anthony decided to share her story with the world in the hopes that it would inspire other Black and Latinx women to prioritize their health and wellbeing. 

"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," she said. "Use me as an example of why not to wait."

La La Anthony