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After making seven pitches to record his second save of the season Tuesday night, Dodgers' relief pitcher Kenley Jansen reported feeling a little bit of a flutter in his heart. Not taking any chances the Dodgers immediately sent him to the hospital where he was kept overnight with an irregular heart beat.
"We had our physician Dr. Mary Gendy look at him in the training room," Dodgers' head trainer Stan Conte said. "We did an EKG and showed an irregular heartbeat that was of some concern."
Conte said that Jansen was under no distress and didn't show any pain.
Jansen was taken to White Memorial Hospital and given medication to normalize his heart beat by cardiologist Tony Nguyen. When that failed, Jansen was given cardioconversion treatment where the heart was shocked back to rhythm at 1:30 p.m. Wednesday afternoon.
Despite how extreme the treatment sounds, there is no added severity for having to undergo cardioconversion.
"Some people can relax and do stuff to turn it back," Conte said. "Other people have to take medication. Some people have to have shock as a way of doing it. It doesn't necessarily have a better or worse prognosis."
Conte stressed that the extent of the problems is unknown at the moment, but it is more common than people realize. "Some people actually have this problem all the time - it kind of comes and goes."
The only other time Conte has dealt with this was back in 2007 with reliever Joe Beimel. Like Jansen, Beimel was hospitalized for two days and underwent cardioconversion to get the heartbeat back to normal.
Conte doesn't envision this bringing an end to Jansen's career."Joe Beimel pitched two days later," Conte said.
Jansen will be kept in the hospital for another night. "Now you monitor the heart to make sure it doesn't go back," Conte said. "One of the things we have to figure out is what really caused this. That's what we'll investigate now."
