Saanvi Jeereddy’s legs dangle from the hospital bed. She stares up at the boxy lights as she is told to lie down. She tries to keep her mind relaxed, but it stays trained on the doctors around her.
They shuffle back and forth, taking her blood pressure and heart rate, muttering their observations to each other. Ten minutes of this routine pass by until they look to her, telling her to stand up.
As pressure enters her feet on the floor, Saanvi’s vision goes black. Holding onto the hospital bed, the doctors measure her heart rate again. A silent moment passes between them as they see the spike — from 72 to 160 bpm.
The doctors tell Saanvi what she already suspected — she had Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS).
As Saanvi began her freshman year, she was excited to be embraced by the camaraderie and familial spirit of the Marcus Band. However, the strenuous practices and 100-degree weather started taking their toll on her.
“I go an hour into practice, and then I can’t see for five minutes,” Saanvi said. “I do all of my choreography blind.”
When these issues got more serious, she went to visit a cardiologist. However, the diagnosis she got was not what she expected.
“I walked out with a diagnosis, but it was the wrong diagnosis,” Saanvi said. “I was told that I just had anxiety and that it’s something every girl goes through in high school.”
The cardiologist referred Saanvi to a therapist who was meant to help her combat anxiety. Recognizing that there was more to the story, Saanvi’s therapist referred her to a different cardiologist who would hopefully find the root of her problems.
As Saanvi explained her symptoms to the doctor, they suggested doing a poor man’s tilt test on her — measuring her heart rate before and after standing up. As she expected, Saanvi’s heart rate jumped over 80 beats per minute, signaling to the doctors that she had POTS.
Being written off by her first cardiologist left a bad taste in her mouth, giving her uncertainty in future medical visits.
“It’s just kind of back and forth with my brain,” Saanvi said. “I know I have to go to the doctor because the doctor’s going to help me get better, but what if they don’t believe me? What if they think it’s all in my head?”
Because of the impact POTS has on her body, Saanvi was not able participate in marching band her sophomore year. While she hoped to at least participate in concert band, she was told that would not be allowed. With more free space in her schedule, she needed to find something else to do. Her friend suggested she take sports medicine, training to heal injured athletes on the field.
“I ended up taking it, and I fell in love with it,” Saanvi said. “I learned how to do CPR in that class, and I learned how to do tapings.”
The first level of the class, Sports Medicine 1, put the students in the middle of the action by having them tend to players of freshmen games.
“It was kind of weird as a 10th grader, but it taught me a lot,” Saanvi said. “It taught me how to get out of my bubble and talk to people.”
Falling in love with the program, Saanvi chose to take the next level of the course as well: Sports Medicine 2. Being in the advanced class, she and the other student athletic trainers tended to the varsity games as well.
To accompany the football players during their practices, the student trainers set up their supplies at 5:30 am. Despite their drowsy eyes, they still enjoyed their time together.
“We were all sleep deprived and everything, but it was just so fun because you were around your friends,” Saanvi said. “Half of the time, we are just goofing off anyways.”
As Saanvi spent more time helping players on the field, she was exposed to different scenarios that challenged her. During a game, one of the football players dislocated their knee, and he needed immediate attention. Saanvi’s coach called her forward and instructed her to hold his knee in place. All she could think was not to cough, not to move a muscle. Paramedics swarmed around her as her coach finished putting a brace on his knee so he could be transported.
“It was my first interaction with allied health and the healthcare field,” Saanvi said. “It cemented that this is something I want to do.”
About a year and a half after Saanvi’s initial diagnosis, she began noticing her symptoms worsening. At night, her heart rate would jump to 170. She sat back down, trying to lower it, but stayed high for about ten minutes. All of the methods she was told would alleviate POTS were not working.
Her watch recorded this information, noting each abnormal spike. Saanvi showed her doctors the videos, and they agreed that this was unusual. They put her on a heart monitor for the next month so they could observe the changes more closely.
A few days after collecting all of the data from Saanvi’s heart monitor, the doctors called her in, saying they needed to talk to her as soon as possible. Contrary to what Saanvi expected, the doctors delivered another diagnosis — Supraventricular tachycardia (SVT).
“Your ventricles, what pumps blood out to the body, go into overdrive and they pump really fast,” Saanvi said. “Because of that, the things that you do to stop POTS like sitting down and resting won’t help.”
With both POTS and SVT being linked to the heart, they feed off of each other, making traditional methods of prevention less effective. Saanvi went on a journey of finding medication that worked for her through trial and error. She has tried about three, and after experimenting with dosage, her doctors came to a set amount.
While this medication is helpful, Saanvi still has hard days with POTS and SVT because there are no specific cures. These difficult moments follow Saanvi onto the field as well.
Earlier this year, before football season began, the team had a scrimmage against Jesuit. While they played in 109º weather, the student athletic trainers set up all of their equipment onto the field. As Saanvi went back and forth from the bus to the field, she could feel herself being drained. The lack of shade in the visitor’s section only made the issue worse, so Saanvi sat down with an ice pack on the back of her neck, unable to keep exerting herself.
“Because POTS is a chronic illness, it’ll suck the energy out of you really quickly,” Saanvi said. “If you overexert yourself one day, the next day it hurts to get out of bed because you’re so nauseous, you feel dizzy.”
In the face of the setbacks she faced, Saanvi wants her priority to be helping others. She plans to go to Texas Tech, a Division I school with a strong program for sports medicine. While she does not plan to pursue sports medicine after college, she does want to go into the medical field.
“I want to be either a pediatric cardiologist or a pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon,” Saanvi said. “I want to be a medical professional that doesn’t dismiss the symptoms of a patient just because it’s a rare disease and not commonly found.”
Her experiences with disbelief and uncertainty have fueled her desire to ensure no one else has to feel held back the same way she did.
“If there’s a roadblock in your path, you should embrace the redirection from the universe,” Saanvi said. “It often knows more than you think.”
