Remember right before my due date, when I had that funny thing happen with my heart? When I talked to my midwife about it, she said yeah, sometimes pregnant women have tachycardia episodes. But she added that mine was atypical for two reasons (one was that it lasted too long and I've forgotten the other) and that I should talk to a doctor about it.
We had only been in town a month; I didn't have a doctor; I had read that arrhythmias can be hard to pin down because they have to happen while you're being tested for the test to be useful. I didn't call.
But then I had another episode a few weeks after Pete was born, and another one a couple of weeks later. Oh, and did I mention the chest pain? Not painful-painful chest pain, but nagging chest pain. It was getting harder to ignore: happening more often, lasting longer, becoming more intense.
I googled for information on heart problems in young women and found a story about a 34yo woman who keeled over dead with no previous history of heart trouble. I called for an appointment.
"I am here a little sheepishly," I told the nurse practitioner. I have no risk factors for heart disease, aside from an uncle with abnormal heart wiring. Was I being a hypochondriac? Was she going to recommend a jillion tests to cover her butt, or was she going to laugh me out of her office?
She did neither. She tested my thyroid and ordered a stress echo. It was yesterday.
I was not very happy about the test. I thought it would end up being several hundred dollars' worth of inconclusive. It was my first separation from Pete. (I know, I know -- how many women have been back at a full-time job for two weeks by the time their babies are this old, and I'm spazzing about a one-hour test? I just like to stay close to my babies when they're this little.) I lay down on the table feeling like a fraud.
After a series of ultrasound pictures, they put me on a treadmill. I was walking slowly, and then a little faster, as the doctor asked me about the arrhythmias. Suddenly, only about a minute into the test, I noticed he wasn't paying attention to me; he was too busy watching the screen. "Stop!" he ordered. "I see it." I think I saw it, too, a messy squiggle where there had been tidy lines. I didn't feel a thing, though.
They rushed me over to the bed with some urgency, but the abnormal rhythm quickly receded. Part of me said, "Hey! He saw it! I'm not a hypochondriac!" and part of me said, "Ack! He saw it! There's something weird going on with my heart!"
His thinking is that I also have some abnormal wiring in my heart, which has only recently begun to cause me problems. (Let's see... could it be... STRESS???) "Is this benign?" I asked him. Usually it is -- it's treatable with medication or with a straightforward surgery. (What "straightforward" means to a guy accustomed to quintuple bypasses is not something I'm going to think about right now.)
He sent me home with a Holter monitor to get a 24-hour recording. I will take it off as soon as I finish this post, and return it to the clinic. They'll follow up with me next week.
I'll keep you posted.
Recent Comments