You are very young to have this be the reason for your sysptoms but it is something to look into, at least look it up on the internet and go from there. About the only way to find this out is by having them do a cardiac cath and putting dye in which I know isn't cheap. One thing about this disease is that stress does play a factor, but I don't want to sound like everyone else who likes to tell women everything is stress or anxiety attacks. You said you moved from alaska, much of my family lives there, they are knife makers in seward. I'm sure with all the snow and avalances lately you are glad to be in florida but there are even stresses to moving like that. Again, let me say that stess is not the disease necessarlly but can cause some very bad health problems or make them worse. Please read below and I hope you can find out what is going on hon, I know how scary this can be, especially if you have children you are worried about. Take care, pixie13
i am posting on here every time I see symptoms that were like the ones I had but doctors tend to laugh off or use an excuse of anxiety, nerves, menopause, etc. To the first poster, that many missed beats are not normal, I had those to and believe me, it is hard to get your nerves better while this is going on and while each doctor sends you home. I will almost guarantee you also that you will get a clean bill of health from the test they give you also, I know I did, but I still had a disease and it was about to kill me, blocking the left side of my heart off 75%! So how did all my test come back normal? Because they are still using test that were only done on men and lab rats and women's vascular system and vessels are very different.
You must look things up, know your symptoms, know what these symptoms can be hinting at and you tell the doctors what your opinion is also, you have that right! As a matter of fact, your life may depend on it.
After much research, trip after trip to the hospital, all the test coming back except for some irregularities in my pulse but still feeling like I was going to die, I discovered to many things that looked like the symptoms I had and the final time I was taken to the hospital and all I remember them saying in the ambulance was, "i think we've lost her' I knew with the last breath I had, I would demand another test. They didn't want to do anything invasive, they only wanted to doctor me with medicine and send me back home and tell me all the things I was doing wrong to cause this, once again, anxiety came in and menopause. I had written on a piece of paper - prinzmetal variant angina - vasospasms and gave it to my husband. When all was said and done and they finally did the invasive procedure, sure enough, the prognosis was, prinzmetal.
Unfortunately there is little that can be done for this, I am on a lot of medicines, I have a lot of lifestyle changes to make, some because I just need to eat and exercise differently, some because it took so long for someone to diagnosis me properly.
Prinzmetal is often called a resting disease because it becomes very painful to sleep or even get good rest, a lot of the symptoms seem to be on the left side of the body and like one poster said, she could feel something wrong in the pulse on her wrist. Boy, was that something I noticed! I would have beats and then just a blank, nothing going on. I had left side numbness on my face and ear, pain in my neck and jaw, in my shoulder. Sometimes it seemed to move and in fact it is, it is different vessels having spasms, including your heart.
This may not be what you have at all but what I am saying, especially to the ladies is, take some of your health concerns into your own hands, you are not a man or a lab rat so there has been very little testing to see how your cardiovascular system works or how you will react to medicines normally use. Take a look at post sent in by some of the males (no offense guys) but a lot of them say, don't worry about, it, its perfectly normal, take this vitamin or eat this food and don't get so worked up about it..... Well, i'm here to tell you if you don't get worked up about it and be informed enough when you go to take that next test, see that next doctor or end up in the hospital you may end up like me, sitting here on the internet at 4 a.M., taking pain pills, 9 different medicines and wish I had just been aware of this disease before. I guess I was just lucky some information I put in on google search happened to bring prinzmetal up, I started not to click on it because I thought it didn't even have anything to do with the heart, I had never heard of it and I study health issues all the time. My wish now and what I am determined to do is bring awareness to others out there, especially women because this is predominately a female disease and I believe we are going to find some correlation between not only symptoms but age factors 40's /-, time of life, menopause, problems with the female system - hormones not in balance, and most importantly I believe there is a direct correlation with what is happening in this persons life, i.E., divorce, relationship problems, death, depression, job stress, home stress, financial stress, (pretty apparent I am saying stress plays a big part in this). The things I am wanting to find out, is all those details from women all across the us and try to form some kind of a questionnaire for doctors, nurses and emergency room attendants and notice how many women are falling through the cracks as far as heart disease, being sent home with "the problem is all in your head prescriptions", or worse yet, not finding the real culprit and send them home and something terrible happens and no one in their family knows why.
Please, help me bring awareness about this disease, I am contacting the heart association to washington and women's groups to help spread the word and getting on sites like this (which is one of the best I have seen and why I chose it to post on)
take heart, take care,
let me know if you have been diagnosed with prinzmetal or vasospasms
sincerely,
pixie13 (dee)
