Monday, February 6, 2012

Just Another Day

It's been a looooong day. 

And for pretty much the entire time I've been awake (which was waaaaay longer than usual due to getting called into an 8 a.m. meeting at school that definitely wasn't scheduled for my convenience), I've felt like I have Mexican jumping beans in my heart. 

The good news? I picked up an event monitor from my doctor late last week, so at least I could inundate them with recordings of my heart acting weird. (Seriously. The monitor holds ten events, and I filled it up and played it for them three times. Not that the "events" were different from each other, but I wanted to make sure the doctors understood that it wasn't just once or twice in a day that I had little spells. It was all frickin' day. And they still got just a teensy percentage of what I experienced. But they can see the log of times and know that I was recording them at regular intervals over the day.)

The bad news? Apparently I was fooling myself when I convinced myself that the palpitations were caused by the Adderall I was taking. But I quit the Adderall back in December, and while for awhile I had fewer occurrences, it clearly didn't make everything all better. 

Everyone has those occasional palpitations where you feel like your heart skipped a beat. I've had those for years, dating back to when I was pregnant with Ellie, which was the first time I got checked by a cardiologist. But I'd have just one or two palpitations at a time, and then go hours if not days and weeks before having another one.

Something changed in December (or was it late November? I don't remember now.) when I first had 24 consecutive hours of feeling like someone had taken my heart into their fist and was somewhat randomly squeezing and shaking it  wildly. 

Best I can tell, they get triggered when I overdo things. Yesterday, I had a pretty good day and was even able to get out into the sunshine and distribute flyers for our school's used book sale in a nearby business district. ( For the locals: Multnomah Village.)

The first weekend Scott had his kidney stone issues? I had three days solid of it. (But I was a good wife and didn't mention it since I knew it wasn't as urgent as what he was going through. :) 

Anyway, it's apparently "just" a regular arrhythmia with early beats followed by the strong beat that's what I really feel. Not that I've heard it from a doctor yet, but the technician who took the recordings over the phone assured me that's all it was. And googling palpitations and early heartbeats, which is what the technician said she was seeing on the strips, makes it clear it's all pretty benign.

Which is good. Except it probably means there's nothing to do for it and it's somewhere between uncomfortable and painful, exhausts me when it goes on and on, and keeps me feeling dizzy and light-headed while it's going on. Gets worse when I'm active, especially if you consider "talking" or walking to be active.

More news when I have it. I'll be leaving a message for my doc tomorrow to try to touch base with her. I'm guessing that it'll be yet another thing that makes multiple of my docs look at the data and say, "Hmmm ... very interesting."

I'm so ready to stop being so interesting to doctors!  


 

2 comments:

Maria said...

I hope things have calmed down for you since this post. There is something so unnerving about unusual heart rhythms...I had to even mute the fetal monitor when I was having my first daughter. Hers were irregular, too, and the more we both stressed out, the more those heart beats reacted. Wishing you a calmer weekend with a little less rhythm section disruption~

Anonymous said...

Good to know that the palpatations are not too serious. I get this a lot too...went to ER once...nothing to worry about with me either. But is can be scary!
mo