I have recently been hurled a great big lemon. Figuratively speaking. I've been dealing with symptoms normally associated with heart attacks. Racing heart. Heart palpitations. Heart beating so hard that you can see my chest bouncing. Shortness of breath. Tight feeling in the chest. Soreness in my chest, shoulder, and left arm. Thankfully, this doesn't happen on an everyday basis. Just on days when I take my propranolol late (a low level beta-blocker I originally started taking for my tremors) or I get stressed out, like I was today.
I started seeing a cardiologist last week. Today, I had an echocardiogram, a stress test, another smaller echocardiagram, an ultrasound that is pretty much the same thing as an echocardiagram, and had an event monitor strapped on me. My day, from the moment I got up, till I got out of the doctor's office at nearly three p.m., sucked. No holding the onions or stinky feet cheese.
Heart problems, having all these tests done, waiting for answers, terrify me. I watched my little sister Elizabeth go through so many tests, so many trials due to her heart problems, watched my parents and close relations constantly falling apart with anxiety, during the fourteen months of her life. So much was done to try to help her, so much was done to her tiny, frail little body in the hopes of giving her a semi-normal life, and she still passed away. I was six when she died. And I didn't realize how much of a phobia I had built up about heart problems and the resulting procedures until this past week, and especially today.
So things that shouldn't have been so bad today, were horribly frightening. I feel burpy just thinking about it. (I burp when I'm nervous. Matt has to pee a lot. And I burp and hope that this one won't bring something up with it.) But now that they're over, I'm glad they're done. And pray to God I don't have to do them again.
I had to arrive, fasting, at the hospital at noon. (Pity my poor family who had to deal with me beforehand. I was bad.) We had to get registered at the Heart Center and pay the whopping $400+ bill that was after the insurance covered its part. The registrar was nice, but didn't help saying things like 'you poor thing.' I started getting twitchy thinking I was possibly in for worse if a hospital employee was trying to be sympathetic AFTER she got our money. I clipped off my nails last week after my last bout of heart-related nervousness, so I had to pretend to bite my nails and pretend that that helped. Yes, seriously, I did. Ask Matt.
Thankfully the wait was short once we paid up. We went back to a nuclear lab in the heart center. Matt had to wait in a tiny waiting room next door, because the lab/stress room was hardly bigger than the waiting room. I had to strip my top half and put on one of the ubiquitous thin cotton, back-tied gowns so fashionable at hospitals and lay down on my left side on a very skinny bed. A Russian-accented technician/nurse then proceeded to do my full echocardiagram. An echocardiagram is, as far as I can tell, a lot like an ultrasound. In fact, I really don't know the difference. I watched my heart on the little slice-of-cone window for a few moments before I had to turn my head. The normal heart says something like "lub-dub" for every beat. My heart says "lubdublub." This is because, according to my cardiologist, the lower ventricles of my heart are trying to stay in time with the top ones of my heart. So I get an extra beat every other or so. And let me tell you, my heart beat was already a little high from anxiety. Watching my heart and knowing it wasn't right made it speed up and my breath to become shorter. The echo tech and the lady administering my stress test were both very nice and polite. Unfortunately, the echo tech was of the school of thought that the closer you can get your little ultrasound wand to the heart, the better. So she jammed it as hard as she could against my breast, under my breast, and the thin skin of my chest. It felt like Natalee was elbowing my really painfully and really hard in the chest. Repeatedly. So my chest feels bruised now, and I have some pretty little red spots where I bled just under the skin.
The first echo. took 20 to 30 minutes. Afterwards, once my cardiologist showed up, was my stress test. It should have been a lot easier than it was, but it wasn't. A stress test is where they put you on a tread mill with electrodes to an EKG hooked up on your chest (still wearing only a hospital gown and the bottom half of your clothes), and they try to make you work hard enough that your heart races hard so they can get a really good look at its beats on an echocardiagram. They angle up the treadmill and speed it up every three minutes. Still shouldn't've been hard. But I had been lying there on my left side (which isn't comfortable for me nowadays with my heart probs) for thirty minutes. To lie there for thirty minutes, with my heart phobic-ly racing already, and then be expected to get on a tilted treadmill and start off at a good clip, was beyond my abilities. I was on the treadmill for six minutes before I felt like I was going to pass out from shortness of breath. And so the pictures from my second echocardiagram weren't as good as they could be. Hopefully they'll be well enough. I won't know till I talk to the cardiologist on the 24th. After being jabbed with that ultrasound wand for so long, I was ready to leave.
Matt drove me over to the cardiologist's office after that. I got to sit in the waiting room, wolfing down a Snickers marathon bar while all the cardiology patients glared at me for it. I had an ultrasound on my heart done there at the office by a lady who has been doing it for thirty years. Thankfully, she is not of the school of stabbing you with the wand. Yay. She said she couldn't really say what's wrong with my heart, since she's not a doctor, but it looks like mitral valve prolapse to her. (My aunt has this. You can learn about it here:
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/mitral-valve-prolapse/DS00504. It has a tendency to run in families, so it's not entirely surprising.) And then, joy of joys, I got outfitted with an event monitor. Three more little electrode stickers with wires were stuck on my chest, attached to a MP3 player-sized electronic recorder that monitors my heart beat. And I get to wear it for thirty days. Maybe more. It's like a class pet that I wear on my hip and poke when I start feeling unwell. And then I write down my side of the story, and I call up the company so it can screech its side of the story to its.....tech on duty, I guess. It's not so terrible. It just makes me focus more on my heart problems, something I've been trying to avoid. And it's so avant-garde-fashionable to go out with a pedometer looking thing attached to my hip, with wires hanging out from the bottom of my shirt. Maybe people will think I'm some greenie nut who powers her pedometer with body heat or heartbeats. Who knows?
Matt's been really wonderful to me, helping me, doing a lot of the dirty work around here, especially with Natalee, taking me out to lunch. But the day still wore me out. So I'm going to finish sipping my nighttime, no-caffeine herbal tea that really isn't tea, and go to bed. Huzzah.
