Ok, here comes my big confessional. I worry about a lot of shit. I don't often come out and say it; I just keep it inside until my body finds some physical way of manifesting the stress instead. I've kind of always expected to end up with an ulcer. My body's preferred way of showing stress is to attack my weak neck vertebrae. The doctors have officially diagnosed me with a herniated disk in my neck. However, the 2 times it got so bad that I had to wear a neck brace both were very stressful times in my life. The Wife and I were responsible for quite a few expenses of our wedding. One month before our ceremony, we got a bunch of bills in the mail, and I got my first attack of neck problems. Strangely enough, the second go around was 1 month before our first child arrived.
Now, I can only wish for something as simple as a pain in the neck. Instead, on December 26th, I got to have a trip to the ER for what has so far been diagnosed as heart palpitations. We were out running errands and I felt a little fluttering of my heart. The Wife noticed that something was not right and I told her what I was feeling. Over the next hour, the intensity rose and fell, but never quite went away. Finally, I was feeling a little tightness in my chest, so with a little prompting from The Wife, I called my Dr's office. After describing the feelings to a nurse, she advised me to get to the ER.
The triage nurse could feel some irregularities in my heartbeat at check-in. They took me into a room, gave me some baby aspirin, slapped a heart monitor on me, drew blood, and did an EKG. The Dr said that if I was having a heart attack, it wouldn't show up in my blood right away, so I'd need to stay and have blood drawn after 3 hours, and again after 6 hours. What fun! The Wife had taken the kids home to give them dinner, so I called her and told her to make arrangements, since I wouldn't be getting out until after 1am. I just about developed bed sores from lying on the stupid bed watching crappy TV. Of course, nothing showed up on any of their tests. I'm sure it was just my body's new way of getting the stress out.
On the 27th, I went to my regular Dr for a follow up. He gave me the paperwork to schedule a stress test. Finally, yesterday morning, I got to return to the hospital to get fitted with a 24 hour heart monitor. There were 10 little pads that had to be attached all around my chest to listen to every little blip of my heart. I had to keep a diary of anytime I felt any strangeness so that they could try to cross reference my activities with any abnormal readings. We'll see. I felt a few flutters that I noted, but the worst one was when I was on the telephone scheduling the stress test. Just thinking about the issue set me off.
This all started about a month ago when I was at my Dr for a routine visit and I was told that for the first time ever, my blood pressure measured high. I immediately started worrying about it, as I have a family history of high blood pressure. The Dr asked me to go the pharmacy a couple of times to use their blood pressure machine, to keep an eye on the levels. So, for the last month, I've been thinking about it every single day. Of course, each time I'd actually stop and check it, it'd still be high, and I'd be worrying more. The entire time I was in the ER hooked up to all the machines, I was registering a high blood pressure as well. However, to top everything all off, when I went to my Dr's office the next day for the follow up, my blood pressure reading was normal. So, I have no idea what's going on. Here's hoping I can get some answers next week as test results begin to come in.
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