Lying To My Heart

Lying may seem like a handy tool to evade responsibility for what you’ve done, but eighth grader Sabrina Kizer has learned that even the little lies can haunt you.

When I was a little girl, my first instinct was to lie. I would tell my dad I had already read, just so I could get five extra minutes to play with my dolls. I would tell my mom that I didn’t eat any chocolate that day, just so I could have more for dessert. I was unaware of how something as small as telling the truth could be life-changing.

However, the problem with lying was that when I told the truth, my parents didn’t believe me.

So one day, at around age 7, my heart started to ache. Just like any other kid does when they get hurt, I screamed for my mom. When my mom came, she told me that I was fine and nothing was wrong. The feeling in my chest eventually passed but did come back every two weeks or so.

Since my mom knew I had been one to lie, she put no second thought into it, like the boy who cried wolf.

One day when my father, a cardiologist, was home, the feeling came back. I was lying on the floor as my dad entered the room. He placed a stethoscope on my heart, and after listening to my heart beat, explained what I felt was tachycardia.

Tachycardia is an abnormally fast heartbeat, the cause usually unknown. So I began to see a cardiologist. The tachycardia got worse over time. When it would happen, I would drop to the floor and get dizzy, not able to move my limbs. Sometimes, I even passed out. We experimented with different heart monitors and took many EKG’s to find the cause of the rapid heartbeat.

Four to five years later, on one of my EKG’s it came up. WPW, or Wolff Parkinson White syndrome, is an extra pathway in your heart that causes a rapid heartbeat, which if left untreated can become life-threatening. So last April, I had a heart procedure to rid my WPW.

After all of this, I’ve been thinking. If I had told the truth when I was younger, my mother would have believed me and would have taken me to the doctor. If my father hadn’t been home that day, I wouldn’t have started treatments as young as I did. I would’ve found out I had WPW much later, which could have made me sicker. This was all because I didn’t tell the truth over a silly candy bar. Who knows? All I know is that the truth is not overrated.

With a Perspective, I’m Sabrina Kizer.

Sabrina Kizer is an eighth grader at Kent Middle School in Kentfield.