HEART TO HEART

I was sick for a month and a half, but didn't know it!

Well, actually, I knew I didn't feel well, but I didn't know just how sick I was for weeks.  I'd gone to the doctor two days before Christmas and had to get shots and antibiotics because of my lungs.  The doctor never told me what was wrong.  I assumed it was a respiratory infection, but it wasn't terrible so I wasn't worried.  We went on our short vacation and I felt ok, so I figured I was over it, but apparently I wasn't.  In my posts about the Nutrisystem program we did, I talked a lot about how tired and weak I felt.  I still believe it's not a great program to be on, and I still believe the lack of food caused some of it, but I believe now that one of my main problems was that I had walking pneumonia again. I honestly had no idea because I wasn't coughing or anything.  I'm almost embarrassed to tell you how I found out I had pneumonia, but since we're friends here, I'll explain.

Let me preface my story with this: I'm not a hypochondriac. I hate going to the doctor and being on medication isn't fun.  I may complain about not feeling well, and I might whine if something hurts, but I don't spend a whole lot of time believing I've got some kind of incurable disease.  The only thing, health wise, that scares me stupid is that something might be wrong with my heart.  We all know I'm paranoid about my heart just...fritzing out.  After what happened to my dad, I worry about that sort of thing.  He'd never had heart problems until the day he had his heart attack and died, and my heart frequently does strange things, so I'm pretty sure my fears aren't unfounded.

Anyway.

Sunday morning, about a week after the diet debacle, I was sitting in church listening to a woman talk about her husband, who had just survived a massive, damaging heart attack.  Like, the kind of heart attack that killed some of the muscle in his heart.  It was scary, and the story spooked me.  It probably wouldn't have bothered me so much if I hadn't been having chest pains all morning and my left arm hadn't gone numb.  I'm not kidding.  I'd been sitting there trying to convince myself that I was fine, that I'd be in a lot more pain and distress if it was my heart (as I've learned to do), but it didn't work.  Against all attempts to keep calm, I went into one of the most insanely intense anxiety attacks I've had up to that point.  If you don't get anxiety attacks, let me explain something: This isn't just being nervous about something.  It isn't having a "bad feeling" that won't go away, this is an all over, absolute conviction something is wrong and it doesn't matter if you try and think rationally, it doesn't work.  I can only assume that it's some kind of out-of-whack chemical thing in your brain that does it, but it's very real and completely terrifying.  I didn't say anything, though.  Well, at least not until after lunch.  I couldn't calm down or breathe, my chest was still hurting and my arm was still numb.  I just jumped into the car and went to the doc-in-the-box.  I think I still had a bit of rationality left in me because a) I didn't ask Steve to come with me, b) I didn't go straight to the emergency room, and c) I managed to calm myself down enough to sit quietly in the waiting room until I was called back. Once I got into the exam room, though, I was so scared that I started to cry. I told them my chest hurt and my arm was numb (it totally was) and that my dad had died of heart problems and that I was scared, which got me fast tracked into all kinds of tests and being hooked up to things.  I happened to mention that I was pretty sure I was having a panic attack - mainly to explain the crying - and that's where things got confusing.  The doctor said "yes, I believe you've been here complaining about chest pains before." I have, but I never thought it was my heart. I'd been there 3 times over a period of five years, maybe, and only a couple of times it was some kind of upper respiratory thing, so I'm not sure what she was talking about. Then the doctor asked if I was stressed and told me that being stressed would damage my heart, even if nothing was currently wrong with it.  The EKG was fine, thank heavens, but the other tests showed I had pneumonia, which explained the pain in my chest. Still have no idea about my arm, though.  Also, because I'd been sick and hadn't been slowing down or getting treatment, it apparently affected me mentally, which happened the last time I'd gotten pneumonia; panic attacks and all. It's all very strange and tangled up, but I understand it better now than I did.  At any rate, she gave me prescriptions for the usual stuff and told me she was also going to give me something to help keep me calm that I needed to take every day. Here is where I am still really confused.  As I said, she seemed to remember, or at least think she remembered, me coming into the clinic a lot about chest pains, but she also seemed to think I'd been in a constant state of panic every time I'd been there.  I thought that was strange, but who knows? Maybe she remembered me and thought I was over-reacting every time.  So she gives me a prescription for something that I thought was like Xanax, or at least some kind of tranquilizer, because she was so worried about my anxiety levels.  Once I found out my heart was fine, I felt so much better. I was shaken, but no where near as afraid as I'd been before, so I didn't take one of those mystery pills until the next day.  I figured that I needed to try it out and make sure it didn't put me to sleep, but it really didn't seem to do anything at all. In fact, it wasn't until I woke up in the middle of the night thinking I was dying that I even thought to look at what I'd taken.

Imagine being dead asleep and suddenly bolting up, fully awake and in such a state of panic that you literally jump out of bed running.  That's what happened to me.  It made the panic attack I'd had the day before look like a case of the hiccups.  I'd asked Steve to sleep in the living room because I knew I was contagious, but I ran in there and shook him awake and told him I needed to go to the ER, that something was wrong and I didn't feel right.  My skin was crawling and my heart was beating so hard that my hair shook.  This wasn't just Crazy Town stuff, this was full on terror.  It's hard to explain, but I thought my chest was going to explode.  If you've ever been startled, imagine that feeling of being startled not going away and only getting stronger.  I grabbed the BP cuff we have and put it on, (that might have been some Crazy Town stuff) and my blood pressure was up higher than it had ever been before in my life.  Steve was trying to calm me down (bless him, his brain was on straighter than my own) he told me I needed to be still and figure out what was wrong.  I wasn't in the mood to be rational, though, and I probably would have jumped into the car and taken myself to the ER (sans pants) had I not woken up enough to realize that I wasn't in pain and I could breathe. I also remembered that I had taken a pill I knew nothing about, which I immediately looked up online.  It hadn't been a tranquilizer at all.  That doctor had given me a prescription for an antidepressant!  What?!

I'm not a doctor, but I do know that you need to know a little bit more about a patient than "Has Occasional Anxiety Attacks" before you put them on antidepressants.  Don't get me wrong, the doctor I see in the Walk-In clinic is a great doctor, but I don't see her on a regular basis. I might go there once a year, if even that, and it's for things like sprained ankles that don't heal on their own, or sinus infections or whatever. Antidepressants are no joke. I've been on them before and they did bad things to me, but I have no idea what made her think that was the right thing to put me on. I am convinced she had me confused with another patient. So I spent the rest of the day trying to keep calm and not scratch my skin off.  My blood pressure eventually went down and in the process of reading about the pills, I found out I'm not the only one that they affected that way. Apparently, you're supposed to keep taking them and just deal with the violent panic attacks until the medicine itself eventually drains you of feeling.  I'm paraphrasing WebMD, of course, but still. Screw that noise.

At any rate, I took my medicine and got over the pneumonia, only to have it replaced by another respiratory infection, and folks, let me tell you, I can't wait to be able to breathe normally again. Sucking on a inhaler is no fun.   So that's the story about how I thought my heart was killing me, when in fact, it was my lungs.  I'd really like it if we had indicator lights on our bodies that tell us exactly which organ groups are giving us trouble.  It'd save me a lot of anxiety.

PS: This took me a long time to write and I can't remember why I went into such a lot of detail.  Sorry about that. 

STUPID NATURE

Do you want to know what happened to us this weekend?

Yellow-jackets! That's what happened to us. 

Stupid, evil, vindictive yellow-jackets.

Do you remember a couple of entries ago, I mentioned that I got stung by a bee while mowing the lawn?  Well, it turned out it wasn't a bee.  Unknown to us, a very large colony of yellow-jackets had built a ground nest near the edge of our property.  It's right up against the property line with our neighbors, so it isn't a place we spend a whole lot of time hanging out and we had no idea  it was there.  The last time I mowed, I guess I just barely disturbed them because I was only stung once, and because Steve said there were some bees hanging around the crepe myrtle, that's what we thought got me.  This time, though, I apparently did more than disturb them.  I must have disturbed them and said something horrible about their mother, if their reaction was any indication!

Since getting stung last time, I was careful to wear blue-jeans when I mowed.  I should have worn tennis shoes, too, but I didn't.  I thought that jeans would be enough, because really, statistically, how often can expect to get stung while mowing your lawn if it's only happened once in 14 years?

So I'm working on the last section of our yard, which is the big part in the front.  I usually start by going around the entire perimeter, and then sectioning it off.  This time, I was doing that, but decided that I needed to go over the same ground since I missed a spot, which was apparently the wrong thing to do.  I hit the nest twice, and as I went over it the second time, they came after me.  The first one got me in the ear!  THE MOTHER-EFFING EAR!  As I sat there, holding my ear, I got stung on my foot, my hand and my calf.  I panicked.  I literally couldn't figure out how to get away.  I realized, way too late that I was on a riding lawnmower, which I then managed to drive into the center of the lawn.  I was still in a panic, so I couldn't figure out how to turn it off, so I just jumped off and ran into the house.  For all I knew at that point, they were still following me.  I ran through the house, stripped off my clothes and I jumped into the shower to drown anything that was still on me.  Poor Steve had no idea what was going on, so he walked over to where I had been and he got swarmed.  While I was in the shower, I heard him running through the house and getting into the other shower.  He'd been stung 11 times on his legs.  He'd still managed to get the lawnmower inside and the garage closed, so points go to Steve in this instance.  We are so lucky that neither one of us is allergic, but we still popped Benadryl just in case.

Y'all, I'd like to say I was stoic and able to deal with the pain with no problem, but I'd be lying.  I always believed I had a pretty high tolerance for pain, but I was proven very, very wrong.  I'd only been stung 4 times, and I think the three on my hand/foot/leg weren't that bad, but it was the one in my ear that nearly drove me insane.  Imagine someone stabbing a needle into your ear and wiggling it around for hours without stopping.  The pain wouldn't back off.  The longer I sat there, the worse it got.  Steve said that his stings hurt, but they weren't that bad.  Me, I just laid down and cried.  I did everything I could think of to help them: we put Neosporin on the stings, we crushed up aspirin applied that, baking soda paste, cortisone cream, but nothing helped.  I finally decided that if I could just go to sleep, I could get away from it.  But I couldn't go to sleep.  My muscles were twitching so bad that I couldn't even doze off.  I tried icing my ear and applying heat to it, but nothing helped.  I even kept trying to take Tylenol and stuff like that, but nothing touched it.  We finally had to go to Target and buy some kind of after sting stuff (that did nothing) and I bought some Z-quil because I figured that if I couldn't go to sleep on my own, I'd drug myself into it.  By the time we got home, my ear was hurting a tiny bit less, but my hand and foot had begun swelling up like balloons.  I did fall asleep, which was a blessing, but I didn't stay asleep for long.  I finally just got up, took the sleeping stuff, and went to sleep for real.  I was going to avoid the pain as much as possible.  That probably doesn't speak well about my coping skills!  Steve said his stings had stopped hurting, but had started to itch like crazy, so he stayed in the living-room all night so that he wouldn't wake me up while he scratched. 

I woke up at around 4:00 that morning, and took more Benadryl, which was not smart on top of all of the other stuff I'd been taking, which made me too drunk to go to church!  Steve was not hurtinganymore, his bites were itchy but he was ok, so he went ahead to church and had to run the sound for me.  I slept for a long, long time.  When I finally woke up, I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror, and...you guys, my ear was 3 times bigger than an ear should be!  It was so gross!  I had a cauliflower ear, for real! It was so swollen that I couldn't even bend my earlobe!  My foot and hand were also swollen up so badly that they didn't look like they belonged on my body.  You know how babies have those little fat, boneless looking hands and feet?  That is what I had on one side of my body.  When I'd walk, my foot looked like a water balloon being compressed.  YUCK! So much yuck!  I WAS A MUTANT! 

 

Artist's Rendition 

I hid in the house for the rest of the day like I was the Elephant Man or something.  I probably could have gone to church that night, the pain was all but gone, but I was afraid everyone would be staring at my ear.  Seriously, it was like freak-show big.  It was still really swollen when I went to bed, but it did go down a lot during the night so I was able to come to work today. Besides, I can stand three people looking at my ear, but not dozens and dozens of them looking.  

At any rate, now we are mainly just very itchy.  My hand a foot are still swollen, but that is getting better.  I'll be glad when I can wear a normal shoe again, though.  We'll be lucky if Steve has legs left after he finishes scratching them. He really did get stung a lot, but he was able to stand the pain much better than me.  I felt like such a weenie.  

So, that was my weekend!  I hope yours was much better! :)

DOCTOR, DOCTOR, GIVE ME THE NEWS...

So...I hurt myself.  Some of you already know this, but I'm going to talk about it anyways because it's my blog and I do what I want!

In light of full disclosure, I'm going to embarrass myself.  I hurt myself at the gym, but I didn't realize it at first. Well, let me rephrase... I knew I'd hurt myself, but it didn't seem so bad.  Maybe the endorphins had kicked in and  I wasn't feeling too much pain, or maybe I was just not paying attention, but I wasn't concerned about it until I got home, and by then my left arm had gone numb.  I'm going to assume that most of you would have thought at that point "Huh, I must've pulled a muscle or pinched a nerve."  Alas, my first thought was "OMG, I'm having a heart attack. I'm going to die here, on the floor, alone in my house."

Now, I'm not usually one to jump to that conclusion right off the bat, but to be 100% honest, I don't expect to live to be an old person.  My father died of a heart attack, my mom has heart issues, and I figure that if it isn't cancer (also rampant in our family) that takes me off, it'll be my heart doing something weird.  So there I was, in my kitchen, trying to decide if I was having a heart attack or not.  So, I Googled the symptoms.  That was not smart.  I didn't have most of them, but it "reassuringly" said that "For women, heart attack symptoms aren't always the common ones."  Well, damnit.  That pushed me over the edge and I began to have a panic attack, which in turn caused more of the symptoms that aligned with the common heart attack symptoms.  Greeaaaat.

Deep down where my common sense grows, and I do have some whether you believe it or not, I knew I wasn't having a heart attack.  Granted, I have very little useful medical knowledge, but something told me that I'd be in much worse shape than I was in if I were truly having a heart attack.  However, the rest of my brain went unto complete panic mode.  I called Steve and told him I was sure I was OK, but just in case I died unexpectedly, I was sorry.  Sorry about what, I couldn't tell you, but panic attacks are a bitch to begin with, and having one while you are convinced you are going to die are even worse and they make you a smidge irrational.  Did I head over to the hospital?  Nope.  I went on to work.  I figured that if I was going to die, why not do it at church? Cut out the middle man, right?  So I got to church, ransacked the first aid kit for some aspirin, and then sat down on the floor. Also, to cover all my bases, I took one of my anti anxiety pills. I was sitting there, in the floor of my office, all alone (everyone was late that day) wondering if I was going to die.

In case you're wondering, I didn't die.

No, I probably should have taken the anti-anxiety pill much, much sooner.  Once I calmed down, I realized that my arm was numb because I'd hurt my back.  I'd been so worried about my heart that I had ignored the fact that I'd pinched a nerve or pulled a muscle or whatever I'd done.  I was also very embarrassed that I'd gone to the edge of crazy for even a fraction of an hour.  Luckily, I hadn't gone to the hospital and insisted that I was dying.  I really, really don't want to end up being one of the people an ER nurse talks about when they are recounting stories about patients.  I mean, unless they are talking about patients who are awesome.

So that crisis averted, I managed to live with my back & neck pain for a few more days.  It was unpleasant, but I could deal with it.  It got kind of bad, but nothing I couldn't handle. At least I was able to handle it until the day I bent down to pet the cat.  Seriously, I just bent over to pet Rorschach and it was like my back said "NOPE! No more!"  It felt like I was stabbed by an icicle.  Everything locked up and I couldn't straighten up all the way.  Steve had to help me to bed and I just lay there like a slug.

As I was telling a friend of mine, I think pain is stupid.  If I'm going to hurt, I want to have to work for it.  Laying in bed or on the couch and just hurting because I'm awake annoys me.  I know pain is important because it helps you to understand your limitations and keeps you from doing things to further injure yourself, but still, it's stupid.  I didn't listen to my pain, and of course, that make it worse.  The day after I had to be put to bed like somebody's maw-maw, I decided that it wasn't so bad.  I had errands to do and I needed to get them done that day, so I hauled myself out of bed and out into the world where I pretty much walked around without bending my neck or moving too fast.  It sucked.  I wound up on the couch for the rest of the day lying on a heating pad/ ice pack, except for when I managed to construct a nifty little harness to strap a cold pack to my back so that I could get up and move around.  The pain came and went all weekend, which was no fun, but at least I didn't have to be immobile the whole time.

I went to the doctor this morning, and he didn't seem very concerned about my back.  I thought he'd at least refer me to a chiropractor, or prescribe a muscle relaxer or something, but he didn't.  So I guess this will just have to pass on its own.  If not, I'm going to have to find a chiropractor on my own.  Fun stuff.

At least I didn't die of a heart attack, though, right? Silver lining! :)