The Heart Remembers: A Case of Cardiac Memory

An 80-year-old male with a history of atrial fibrillation and a single-chamber ventricular pacemaker presented to the hospital for an elective colonoscopy. He experienced a transient episode of unresponsiveness with seizure-like activity before the procedure. This prompted him to get an EKG showing deep T-wave inversions (TWIs) in the precordial leads on a background of paced beats. Such findings were concerning for an acute and potentially life-threatening process such as myocardial infarction (MI) or intracranial insult. After ruling out any severe conditions, the EKG findings were attributed to cardiac memory, an underdiagnosed cause of deep TWIs in patients with a pacemaker.