Worrying

One of the things I struggle with all the time is that I still have strange symptoms once in a while. My wife and parents urge me to stop worrying, but I have to admit, these symptoms make me feel as though another afib incident is somewhere down the road for me.

As an example of what I'm talking about, just before I started writing this entry, I leaned up against the side of my chair. For some reason, when I want to lean, I tend to go to the left. And I have noticed that sometimes when I do that, I feel my heart skip a beat or two.

My doctor tells me that heart palpitations are a fact of life for many, many people. That is one reason that my wife and parents urge me to stop worrying when those things happen. But the fact of the matter is that I never had heart palpitations until about three years ago, and two years ago I started on my long cycle of hospitalizations. So whether or not they are something to worry about, they are something that I naturally worry about. I mean, they never troubled me until recently, and they almost seemed to be a harbinger of the troubles I've had recently.

In fact, this is probably one of my biggest challenges right now, because the palpitation I felt a little while ago was not an isolated incident, not even if I only take today into account. There were at least four times today when I felt that strange things were going on with my heart.

Now I know that it is possible, maybe even likely, that those four events were not threatening to my overall health. In fact, I've only been out of the hospital for three weeks. It's quite possible that those four events were simply a by-product of what I'm pretty sure was a bunch of extra stress on my heart late last month. And I'm quite certain that nothing that I felt today warrants a new trip down to New York Presbyterian Hospital.

So the only questions that leaves me with are these: Can I keep my mind off the idea that every strange heartbeat is a step closer to landing back in the hospital? Is that even the right thing to do, or is that a way of ignoring the problems? Can I both deal with my health concerns, and take care of the people in my life who desparately want me to stop worrying?