Julia - Broken If statement in while loop?

I am currently trying to constantly check a condition inside an infinite while loop. I am breaking out of the loop with a few conditionals. However, the while loop is immediately breaking and a debugging println() shows that the code is inside of the first if() statement. Hoover, the preceding line was never run and the if statement needs that information (polar) to compute. I only get an error when trying to call polar later in the program and it does not exist. It is as if that line has been entirely skipped.

Here is the while loop in question:

prevSize = 0
sec = 0
n = 5
while true # wait unit the polar file is done changing
    polar = readdlm(polarPath,Float64,skipstart = 12)
    if polar[end,1] > aEnd - aStep
        println("Done writing polar file")
        break #File is fully loaded
    else #check every n seconds for stable file size
        sleep(1)
        global sec += 1
        if prevSize == filesize(polarPath) && sec == n
            println("Polar file could not converge for all AoA")
            break # after n seconds if filesize is constant then use current polar
        elseif sec >= n
            global sec = 0 # reset sec every n seconds
        end
        global prevSize = filesize(polarPath)
    end
end

The program prints out "Done writing polar file" which means that it used the first break. However, polar was never initialized as a variable and separately calling polar[end,1] > aEnd - aStep gives the expected error of no variable called polar. So my question is how can the code have skipped over the line defining polar and then evaluated an if statement that it does not have the information for?