Jim Harbaugh may be just a day removed from a scary heart incident, but he isn’t planning on slowing down anytime soon.
“It would take my heart stopping for me not to be out there on the sideline,” he said on Monday, via The Los Angeles Times.
The Los Angeles Chargers’ head coach was seen entering their blue medical tent and then leaving for the locker room minutes before their game against the Denver Broncos got started on Sunday afternoon in Colorado. He revealed after the game that he experienced an arrhythmia, or an irregular heart beat. More specifically, he was dealing with an atrial flutter, which is when the abnormality causes the upper chambers of the heart to beat too quickly.
Harbaugh said he could tell his heart was beating irregularly before the game, which is what led him to seek help. He experienced a similar incident ahead of a game in 2012 when he was coaching the San Francisco 49ers, too. His first atrial flutter, he said, occurred in 1999.
On Monday, a cardiologist confirmed that Harbaugh experienced an atrial flutter for the third time in his life. He will now wear a heart monitor for two weeks, and will take both a blood-thinning medication and a medication that stops his heart rate from spiking or dropping. The first two times Harbaugh experienced atrial flutter, he underwent an ablation procedure. That procedure, which destroys the tissue that causes abnormal electrical signals, is still an option.
“As always, we’ll trust the doctors,” he said.
Harbaugh, 60, is in his first season back in the NFL after he spent the past seven years as the head coach at Michigan. The Chargers are now 3-2 after Sunday’s 23-16 win in Denver. They will take on the Arizona Cardinals next week on Monday night.
