A year ago I went to the hospital for chest pain and they did a troponin test and said I had suffered heart damage due to cocaine use. AFTER THAT, chest was hurting all the time, nausea, and a general ill feeling. Over the next month I went to emergency 3 more times and I also had a physical which showed my cholesterol through the roof. I would wake up in the morning, before my alarm, and the heart would be pounding. No more positive troponin tests came back from the three ER visits, and it turned out stomach ulcers were the likely cause of all the chest pain. On the last ER visit the Cardiologist noted that my initial troponin reading had been like .65 ppm and an actual heart attack was not considered to have happened unless the reading was 1.50 ppm. Nobody had told me this before then, so in my mind I had been circling the drain. With each bit of good news, I got better and had more good days, and quitting coffee reduced the stomach discomfort to almost nothing(quitting the coke helped too). It seems like when the bad stuff started to happen, my mind just ran with it. I would sit down after a meal and my heart would just start racing.
Eventually,things got pretty much back to normal(after maybe 6 months), except I remained on stomach meds. A few weeks ago, I started drinking coffee again. It only caused minimal discomfort at first, but in the last while it has been causing upper chest pain(I may have a hiatal hernia)just like last year. About 10 days ago a friend of mine, just 3 years older than me, died of a heart attack in his sleep. He had just had a physical a couple of weeks ago and was fine. Only since then have I been having broken sleep, and I have woken up at about 4am maybe 3 times now which my heart just pounding. No pain or sweating so common sense says my mind is blowing things up again, but the heart pounding scares me. It's like waking up after a bad nightmare, only I haven't been having nightmares.
If I was thinking a bit about heart issues when I went to bed, would that lead to it? Can anxiety alone cause your heart to start pounding like you ran a marathon? I was never officially diagnosed with anxiety issues before, I just deduced this from the fact, that I would be feeling doomed and nauseous one day, but when I got the good cholesterol test back, or the Dr told me I had not actually suffered an MI I felt perfect. Anyone
have anything like this?
anxiety sufferers often monitor their hearts, fearing this is needed to keep them beating and this can and does cause the heart to hammer, thud and jump around in the chest causing hickups, also causes palps and skipped beats
more and more heart tests are usually demanded , including holter monitors with the person never satisfied that their heart is quite OK
our hearts work best when ignored, remember that our hearts need no help from us, they keep beating on their own when we are asleep, dont they?
a beta blocker med is often used to calm the heart, can be taken daily or only as needed
