Julie Bowen, famous for her role as Claire on Modern Family and one of the upcoming stars of Adam Sandler’s Happy Gilmore 2, revealed on a new episode of Michael Rosenbaum’s podcast Inside of You that 25 years ago she was given a medical diagnosis that made her think she was “going to die.”
In the Tuesday episode, Bowen revealed that when she was 29, she was diagnosed with hypervagotonia, which affects her heart’s natural rhythm. “It means your heart rate just goes really low,” Bowen explained.
Bowen added that she now has a pacemaker that’s set so that it can’t go below 45 beats per minute, but at the time, she didn’t know she had any problems. “I was a runner all throughout high school and I was a really competitive runner and I always had a really low heart rate,” Bowen explained.
It wasn’t until she went on vacation with her sister who had just graduated medical school that she was alerted to any sort of issue. “She always carried around a stethoscope, and we were on vacation,” Bowen recalled. “She listened to my heart, and she was like, ‘That is not a runner’s heart or whatever, you need to go to a cardiologist.’”
So, it was during the filming of the pilot for Ed, co-starring Tom Cavanagh, that Bowen had to get a pacemaker inserted to prevent her heart rate from plummeting too low. “I was like, ‘Oh my god my life is over,’” she said. “‘This is so weird I’m going to die.’ …I was 29.”
The condition on its own isn’t inherently fatal, but Bowen was warned it could still be incredibly dangerous. “They said I wouldn’t probably die of it, but I’d start passing out,” she continued. “There was a vague feeling whenever I was relaxed, really like watching TV or a movie or something and it was like I’d been holding my breath for a while. That feeling of lightheadedness.”
Bowen said the doctors told her, “‘You’re going to be driving a car and you’re going to pass out and you’re going to kill somebody.’ And I was like, ‘Oh well then, give me the goddamn pacemaker.’”
Fortunately, Bowen’s life hasn’t been too impaired by the device. In fact, she said a few times throughout the interview with Rosenbaum that she frequently forgets she even has one.
