Ammon News - Catherine O'Hara was diagnosed with a rare medical condition before her death.

During a Virtual Happy Hour with Kathryn Hall in 2020, O'Hara — who died on Jan. 30 at age 71 — opened up about her dextrocardia situs inversus diagnosis and explained how she discovered the condition much later in life.

Dextrocardia is a rare congenital (present at birth) heart defect in which the heart is positioned on the right side of the chest instead of its normal position on the left side. Dextrocardia on its own does not usually cause problems, but it tends to occur with other conditions that can have serious effects on the heart, lungs and other vital organs, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine. The condition can also cause other organs to be on the opposite side of the body.

It is unknown if dextrocardia situs inversus contributed to O'Hara's death.

"I'm a freak, yeah!" said O'Hara, who learned about her diagnosis more than 20 years ago while visiting the doctor with her husband Bo Welch.

"I love Western medicine, I just don’t want to be a part of it. But I had to get a TB test when our youngest was in co-op nursery school and I went to my husband’s doctor, and he said let’s do some baseline tests, and one of them was an EKG," she explained.

"He calls us into his office and says, 'You're the first one I've met!'" O'Hara said of the doctor revealing her diagnosis. "I don't even know the name, because I don't want to know the name. Something cardio-inversus. And then dextrocardia and something-inversus. People are going to think I'm so ignorant not to know this, but I kind of don't want to know. Because I didn't know before that."


Fox News