A young woman seeks treatment for one condition but won't accept help for a different diagnosis.
The patient, in her early 20s, had red hair, pretty features and a disarming sincerity. When I first met her in the cardiac care unit, she told me that she had been on a flight from Helsinki, Finland, to Detroit, where her grandmother lived, when she developed palpitations and dizziness. Finding her pale and sweaty, a flight attendant had taken her to the back of the plane to lie down. The plane's automatic external defibrillator, she said, had revealed a potentially life-threatening arrhythmia.
