A Pain in the Chest

Just wanted to give a quick update, as some of you may have heard that I was in the hospital overnight. I started out Wednesday morning with chest pain and when my friend Diana took me for my Neupagin shot the nurses told me my vitals were fine, but the protocol was: chest pain = trip to the emergency room.

Me: But I'm a total hypochondriac. I'm sure it's nothing.

Nurse Candy: Well, you are a hypochondriac ... But you also have a medication in your system that poses a serious threat to your heart, so it's okay to be a hypochondriac right now.

And this is why we love Nurse Candy.

I convinced them all I was fine and made Diana take me shopping and we ate and I felt fine, the chest pain just sort of came and went and didn't seem to affect my breathing at all. It was a lovely morning (thank you, Diana!), and though Diana offered a million times to drive me to the ER, I refused to go.

But in the afternoon my muscle aches kicked in from the shot and suddenly my chest got tight and my breathing was "labored." The Forest Home RN checked me out and thought my left lung didn't sound right and that my heart rate was a little high. So I finally gave in and went to the ER at Redlands Community and they got me in quite quickly. Paramedics hooked me up to a million things and they began to run blood tests, did a chest x-ray on me while I lay in the bed, and gave me baby aspirin, some spray under my tongue a few times and then a series of three injections until they got my heart rate down from 115 to 65. (I got a taste of what my father has experienced at his trips to the ER for his hard-working heart! I would like to say that my bald head helped get me in so quickly ... but I don't think his bald head worked the same for him at his first go round!)

In the end, there were no signs of a heart attack from the blood work, chest x-ray was normal, but they wanted to keep me for observation overnight and do a stress test with a cardiologist. So I was moved to a room upstairs. My heart rate crept back up, but with some earplugs from Nate I had a pretty restful night at the hospital. They woke me up every four hours for vitals, blood and and an EKG and I'd just go right back to sleep, even hooked up to all those machines. (I was that tired!)

To make a long story short, my stress test and heart ultrasound showed a healthy heart and the conclusion was that the Adriamycin is not giving me heart trouble, I simply have a problem with anxiety (this was not news by any stretch of the imagination) and have some nerve issues and aches still from my surgery that make things worse and cause me to freak out and think something is wrong and my heart rate just goes up, up, up ...

It's been an eventful week, there is more to tell--yes, I have let it slip that I'm now bald!--but I'll save it for later. Just wanted to let you all know I slept well at the hospital, I'm fine, I'm out and at home and will do my best to keep my heart calm.

Because there's so little for me to stress about, really.