LaMarcus Aldridge couldn’t sleep.
It was April, after a game against the Lakers, and he hadn’t felt like himself all night. He did not disclose it to anyone, but he had played despite an irregular heartbeat. Now, with his family back in Texas, he sat awake in his Brooklyn apartment all alone and his heart was racing.
Aldridge was no stranger to heart issues. In 2007, his rookie year, he was diagnosed with Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, a condition that causes a rapid heartbeat. To preserve what became a standout career, he endured multiple surgeries and hired a team of doctors from across the country. They did case studies on his heart, devising a checklist for him to use whenever he had trouble. All of the techniques were designed to get his heart rate up, which would then get it back into a regular rhythm. But on that night against the Lakers, for the first time since his diagnosis, those techniques were useless.
“Once you get to that higher rate you shouldn’t feel anything,” Aldridge explained to The Athletic last week. “And I’m in the game at a higher rate playing against the best in the world and I still had that irregular rhythm. That was my biggest trigger.”
He felt chest tightness. His heart rate fluctuated from fast to slow at random, which he’d never experienced. Worry kept him up into the early hours of the morning.
“It’s like all that research was flushed down the drain in one game because I had never been in that position before,” said Aldridge, who eventually texted the Nets’ team doctors before winding up in the hospital.
In the following days, Aldridge sought multiple opinions.
