One of the reasons I started this blog is so that I would have a place to record the symptoms I have. I've been having strange symptoms for at least four years now, and one of the biggest frustrations I have is that I never know what to make of them. I don't want to sound like I'm complaining, but the symptoms I am talking about baffle me and are often a bit scary.Yesterday, for example, my chest felt funny. It was hard to define the symptoms I actually had, but basically, I felt like my heart was weak. As if the muscle was tired. It doesn't seem like your heart is a muscle that is allowed to get tired. I mean, it has to keep going for a long time yet. So that is a bit scary.
Now, the rest of my body was pretty tired, too. We spent Memorial Day weekend in New York City, and we walked blocks and blocks, pushing thirty plus pounds in a stroller, in high heat and high humidity. The apartment we stayed in was warm and I found it hard to sleep, and then I didn't sleep well on Tuesday night either. So I guess tiredness should not be completely unexpected.
However, where my heart is concerned, I get worried. In this particular case, I felt odd enough to take my blood pressure. Sure enough, my cuff, which beeps on each beat, went beep pause pause pause beep pause beep pause beep pause pause pause, and so on. I tried it three times, and all three times, I had an irregular rhythm. Is my heart supposed to do that? Probably not, but in the week in March after I had my ablation and before they put my pacemaker in, that is what it was doing. In fact, the reason I have a pacemaker is to ensure that the pauses between beats don't go on too long and make me pass out. And that seems to be working.
Yet, when I have this irregularity, I have a hard time concentrating. I seem to get dizzy, or at least fuzzy-headed. My chest and sometimes my left arm seem to hurt, and my extremities sometimes get tingly. On the other hand, I believe this happens more often when I am extremely tired. So what to do?
I could have called the doctor, but I didn't. I did not believe that I had developed afib, plus I had noticed the same irregular rhythm on the day I last went to my doctor, and they had looked at my heart and not seen an afib condition. So I decided to take a Tylenol PM and sleep on it.
When I woke up this morning, my chest felt better. I felt somewhat refreshed, although still very tired. Of course, when I take Tylenol PM, it sometimes takes many hours before I feel like the drug is out of my system. I worked all day and didn't worry about my heart. However, around seven o'clock, I started feeling pretty drained again. My fuzzy-headed headache, left arm aches, and discomfort in my chest was back. I'm going to sleep on it again, because I'm not sure what else to do.
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