April 8, 2018

In which Meriwhen gets a good scare

No story build-up here, I'll just say it:  chest pain.

I had it for about 3 or 4 days.  It wasn't (isn't, as it's still kind of here) aching or stabbing, it's more of an uncomfortable pressure.  It's not radiating.  It doesn't get worse with exertion.  It doesn't get better with rest.  It did wake me up one night.  The only other symptom I have is a little tachycardia one morning, but it was gone by the evening.

Now, if this was someone asking me for advice, I'd say, "get thee to an ED today."  If if was a patient, I'd be seeking advanced counsel and probably calling the MD as well.  But of course, I don't tell myself that.  I'm a nurse and let's face it:  nurses are the world's worst patients.  So I schedule a next-day sick appointment after work.  What's one more day, right?  Let's just ignore the fact that I have cardiac issues on both sides of my family.  And let's ignore the Lisinopril in my medicine cabinet that I take daily.

That night, I was kept busy enough at work that it didn't bother me too much...it was when it was slow, that I noticed it was still there.   Not stressing over it, because I know that in a few hours,  I'll be at my doctor's getting checked out.

But it's not until I'm actually there in the clinic, getting an EKG and cardiac lab work done that I realize that this could be really serious.  Especially when my PCP orders a D-Dimer test for the presence of clots and tells me that if it comes back positive, that I need to drop everything and get myself to the ED for a CT scan.

I'm not young:  according to Erikson, I'm entering Generativity vs. Stagnation.  People my age die from cardiac issues.   I see it in the ED all the time. 

I gave up smoking 20 years ago.  I don't drink alcohol anymore.  I don't do drugs, legal or otherwise.  I'm in decent shape.  II'm physically active, though not as consistently as I should be.  I could stand to drop that 30 pounds I recently regained.   I have hypertension, though well controlled.  I have cardiac issues all over my family tree, including heart attacks and deaths from stroke.

And heart disease is the #1 cause of death in women.   And heart attacks in women don't always present with the typical "clutch the chest and feel the left arm go numb" symptoms.  It presents like indigestion, like heaviness.  Like how I felt.

Yes, I already knew all of this.  But again, nurses make the worst patients.

So I spent the morning being tested 10 ways from tomorrow.  My EKG is beautiful.  Exertion test is great--I actually wore out the LVN that was monitoring me because she couldn't keep up with my speed.  Lab work is beautiful.   Then I get to go home and wait, anxious as hell, for the D-Dimer results.  Because I can't go to sleep until I get this test result, in case I need to call out of work and find a good book to take with me to the hospital.

Fortunately, it was negative.  Unfortunately, I couldn't sleep even after getting that news.  So work that night was challenging, to say the least.

My PCP decided to start off my treating me for GERD, since he thinks it could be an atypical presentation.  So now I'm on omeprazole for a couple of weeks to see if that helps.  It's been two days on the medication, and the discomfort seems to be lessening, which is positive.  It might just be atypical GERD after all...I hope.

All of this was quite the scare for me, as well as quite the reminder that I could still improve my health.  I'm waiting until the discomfort is fully gone before I try out the treadmill we bought with the tax refund.  It wasn't a large refund so it's not a large treadmill.   But it's another way to exercise.