Update:
The news is as I have come to expect, and that is good. I finally got to actually sit down with a cardiologist and discuss the issues, and he was pretty sure there is nothing wrong with me.
It's odd to have gone through the last five months with several episodes where I was close to losing consciousness, heart racing, fluttering, dizziness, etc... only to be told that nothing is wrong. But I'm basically at a 90% agreement with him. There's a little 10% that is still a bit on the alarmist side of this; part of that being simply because IT HAPPENED! and KEEPS HAPPENING, and people in the room with me don't like it when It looks like I'm dying. Well, I don't either.
I've studied enough psychology, and have read enough about this stuff recently to know that this is a thing: to have symptoms, but no actual problem. And even as I was waiting for this appointment, I knew what he was going to say, but I still wanted to get it on the record.
So... what I think (and what the doctor confirmed) is going on, is a few things.
- First, I'm active, I weigh 162, but I'm actually out of shape, so even though my heart is strong, it isn't trained to respond well to bad stimuli.
- Second, I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out what stress might be in my life. And it turns out there is a lot of 'slow burn' stuff going on this year. Nothing bad, my life is too good, but this year has been the busiest of my entire life. By far.
- Third, my diet. I'm not intolerant to anything that I know of, nor allergic. But as was discussed a bit here, in the past 6-7 years, my tolerance for simply eating too much has dropped drastically. In fact, I can honestly say that one of the worst nights of my life was almost certainly caused by an overly large burrito. (Unfortunately, coffee and drink seem to be contenders as well.)
- Finally, my sleep habits. I've always been a light sleeper. I usually go to bed between 10 and 11, and get up at 5:45. Which is good, right? Not if you wake up and stay awake 3-4 times per night. I've always known this isn't good, but now that I'm mid-40s, I can't ignore it. So over the past few years, but especially since January, I've been training myself to get to bed by 10 if I can, and to sleep on my side. This keeps me from snoring as I had been starting to see signs of apnea, but not anymore.
All this is to say that since my system seems to really mess with my sinus node, all of these factors have basically been ganging up on me since January.
It also made me think of what might have caused these same issues 7 years ago. Well turns out the last time I was hit with a wave of these symptoms there actually were a few things going on: We had just moved to our current home. I was in the middle of my master's degree program. I had a pinched nerve in my back that was bad enough that I could not drive or dress myself for several weeks. My daughter had recently been hit by a car. And my brother had been out of country with the Army for a particularly long period of time. Usually it was only a week or two. You send some text messages and don't hear back for a few days, and you know he's gone. But at this time he had been 100% out of touch for over six months. This was also when I was the most out of shape and over weight I'd ever been.
Anyway, if you've read this far, thanks for the support. Being able to vent about it did help. During the time when I started this thread, I was having 'events' multiple times per day, several of them bad enough to really cause me to take my mortality seriously. I'd like to hear about what others are going through, especially if you, or those you know actually have real pathology, not just like my fake stuff! LOL!
