Tag: tachycardia


Can’t and Won’t Are Different Things

6
February

I’m going to start this by saying that I love my mother and father dearly because I may say some things that indicate otherwise.

I’m tired sleep deprived.  I don’t get to sleep well very often.  I’m always doing something for someone, whether it is waking up every two hours to get my mom food and water or waking up every morning to wake my dad up (even though he has an alarm clock) or waking up to cook dinner for them.  I’ve become a mother to my parents, and that might be okay, except I don’t want to be their mother and I don’t feel like I can keep doing these things for them.  I can’t quit, though, because it isn’t a job.  And I try not to complain because I know that they both don’t feel well and I know that my dad does some things around the house that I can’t do.

Still, I want to quit.  I want to run away and hide somewhere where they can’t find me.  I want to leave and never come back.  And I know that that is selfish, but I just cannot deal with this any longer.  I feel like shit and I need to sleep, but I can’t because someone always needs me.  So, the more sleep I miss, the grumpier that I get and the worse I feel.  I try to point this out, and it is remembered for all of two seconds before I get my marching orders again.

My mother fell last weekend and cracked her ribs.  She wouldn’t go to the doctor for the first few days after the fall, but just kept whimpering like a hurt animal.  She said she couldn’t go to the doctor because my dad wouldn’t take her.  She hadn’t told my dad she needed to go, and he can’t exactly force her to go.  (He knew she needed to, but I don’t think he wanted to try to convince her.)  So, I told him that she needed to go, and I told her that I told him that she needed to go.   She went to the ER last week and found out that her ribs were cracked.  The doctor at the ER couldn’t give her any extra pain medicine (because she’s on one with an opiate antagonist in it), so he gave her Flexeril.

My mom doesn’t do so well on Flexeril.  Every time she takes one, she ends up sleeping through days and wondering around in a stupor.  She gets whiny and she gets more clumsy.  And this leads to her falling more often and to her making claims that we either don’t love her or don’t take care of her or don’t pay attention to her.

Case in point, she fell last night.  She had already fallen about 12 hours earlier and managed, with some help, to get up on her own.  (Keep in mind, when she broke the ribs last week, she got herself off the floor with absolutely no help.)  Last night, though, she wasted her energy holding on to a door frame during the fall, so she was too tired to try to get up when she finally completed the fall.  We had to call the ambulance.  Even though she was fine, other than that she was in a drugged out state and a little sore, she decided she had to go to the emergency room.  There was nothing wrong, but she needed to have tests run to prove that to her.

When my father and I were going to call the ambulance, she first accused us of not taking care of her and not loving her.  This was after I’d managed to hear her call (over Mims’ “Like This”), run to her, then run to my dad’s room and gotten him up, and we’d both spent about 30-45 minutes trying to help her get up.  My dad had tried to basically pick her up, even though she weighs about 100 pounds or so more than him.  I’d moved pieces of furniture toward her that I thought would help her get up easier.  My father was out of breath and worn out.  I was about to pass out or vomit or both.  But because we headed toward the phone to call someone else to help her, which she had asked us to do a minute earlier, she determined that we didn’t care enough for her.

When the paramedics got here, she enjoyed slinging some barbs at our expense.  My dad drove to the hospital at 3:30 or so in the morning, even though he has trouble seeing at night, so that he would be with her at the ER.  (I stayed here, as I usually do.)  When she got home, she had my dad fix her 2 breakfast burritos.  A couple of hours later, she woke me up with an order for a bagel and cream cheese.  And at about 1 pm, she asked me to fix her 2 small frozen chicken biscuits, her 32 oz. cup of water, and hot chocolate.  That wouldn’t be such a big deal if we had a decent microwave, but since the biscuits took about 5-6 minutes to cook, as did the hot chocolate, and I didn’t feel like I could waste the energy sitting down and standing up, I ended up standing up during the 12 minutes it took to do this.  A while after she had eaten that and had gotten up for a minute, I ended up having to move her back onto her couch.  And she was still in the “my family is awful to me” mood, which made it that much harder.  (Somehow, the moodier she is, the less cooperative she is.)  She even said it a few times, which I wanted to scream at her over.

I get that she is in pain, but she is stuck in this bubble.  She thinks that no one takes care of her, which is ridiculous.  We do everything that she asks for and she still gets pissed off at us.  And she’s doing more of her “I’m worse than you are” comparisons again.  She’d stopped for a few days, but she’s back at it.  If I tell her that I’m going to faint, I don’t exactly want her to try to one-up my statement.  I want her to say that I should go sit down or take a break or something that I would think a mother would suggest to their daughter when their daughter said something like that.  And, this may sound petty, she always seems to fall more (and have to go to the ER) when I have an appointment with a doctor or someone that I need to see.  She may not plan it, but it almost always happens that way.

So I’m frustrated.  And I’m sitting here with a splitting headache, and I know that I can’t take anything for it because my mom might need me and my dad is getting in his much-needed rest.  So I’m going to try to avoid talking to anyone on the internet until I get a little bit of sleep because, until then, I am going to be bitchy.

1 comment » | Causes, Confessions, Family, Sickness and Health

Life Is Never As Easy As It Should Be

25
May

How do you exercise? Doctors recommend it like it is such an easy solution to being overweight or obese. They make it sound like you can just start doing it and do it properly from the first time on. They make it sound like doing it will make the pounds just fly off. They make it sound like when you exercise, all of your problems will go away.

I can’t imagine exercising daily or at all. I walk five to ten feet and my muscles feel the same amount of fatigue that they would feel when I was younger and would walk a half a mile to a mile. I walk five to ten feet and my heart goes from 110-120 bpm to 140-160 bpm. I walk any longer and my muscles will start twitching so much that I feel like I’m a bag of popcorn that is heating up.

I would love to exercise, but I don’t know how to do it safely. I don’t know how to do it without having my heart beat so fast that I pass out. I don’t know how to do it without getting so fatigued. I don’t know how I can do it every day if doing minor exercise generally results in me sleeping it off and feeling like shit for days afterwards.

2 comments » | Rants, Sickness and Health

You Get 99 Dollars, But You Shouldn’t Get 1

24
May

You know how I didn’t want to go to the cardiologist today because I knew that he would say that he couldn’t do anything and that he would mention that he wouldn’t (if he could) because of my weight? I was right. He told me that he couldn’t treat the high blood pressure spells because my blood pressure is still on the low side of normal some of the time. He then said that he wouldn’t do anything and he didn’t want to test anything because he feels that the problem is my weight and only my weight. He said my blood pressure may be going up because I’m anxious, which I never said that I was anxious. I’m not really that much more anxious than normal, so I think that was just a way he could ignore dealing with the problem and shift the blame to me. He did eventually decide that he was going to do one test: an echocardiogram.

He spent a grand total of maybe four or five minutes with me. In that time, he didn’t look at the list of medicines I was on, but was able to say that none of my medicines could be affecting my blood pressure or heart. He didn’t look at my chart. He lectured, listened to my heart, listened to my lungs, lectured, left the room, and came back for a second to mention the ECHO. That was it. He left his nurse, Carol Ann (not joking about the name), to finish up my chart. I don’t know why she was even in there, except that she does his chart-work. (I guess he’s too good to do his damn work.)

I don’t understand how he can get paid (or ask to be paid) $99 for an appointment that he doesn’t even really do anything at. If you get paid $99 to tell someone they’re fat and to listen to their chest, then what does he expect to get when he actually does work? I mean, I know when he does surgeries that he gets tens of thousands of dollars, but what about the rest of the time?

The ECHO was interesting. I had to wait a while (almost 2 hours) to have it done. They only seemed to do 2 people at a time, which I think is weird since they had 6 people to do them. (If you have that many people, shouldn’t you have the same number of rooms?) I’d never had an ECHO, but it was a lot like having any other kind of ultrasound. It was a little different, since they used the Doppler and since you can actually listen to your heart rhythm.

I have no idea what was going on in my ECHO or what the results will be. (They’ll probably be normal or “within normal limits”.) All I know is that (at times) it looked like I had a rat dancing in my heart. It looked like there was a head with two arms (the valves) kind of going up, like it was jumping. There was some clicking sound at one point. It also looked like (on the Doppler screens) some of the red was going back into the blue’s area. Of course, I may have been noticing things that meant absolutely nothing, so there’s no point in worrying about it, right?

Though I was disappointed with the rude attitude of the cardiologist, I was glad that I didn’t run into the lady I had seen yesterday at the Mental Health Center. I wore (after washing it overnight) the same shirt that I had worn to the appointment yesterday. Unfortunately, the shirt sometimes lifts up when I move my arms to adjust my hair. The woman yesterday saw me lift my arms and probably saw about an inch or less of my stomach. As I got closer to the building, she started ranting about how she “didn’t want to see” my stomach. When I looked at her, she (of course) snapped at me for looking at her. I was not surprised that she was the one who went to the intake side of the office, since it seemed like she needed some serious help. I know that my stomach isn’t nice to look at, but it wasn’t like I was trying to show it off. I thought her behavior was a bit uncalled for, though it was slightly entertaining.

Wow, and before I can even finish the post, I get a call about the results from the test today.  It’s normal.  I am not surprised.

Comment » | Alabama Weirdness, Confessions, Mental Health, Rants, Sickness and Health

I Promise I Will Be There

24
May

In the past I have had doctors and therapists who don’t do the reminder calls, so I’ve learned not to really expect them.  Sure, I prefer when I get them, since I’ve usually scheduled the appointment weeks (sometimes months) in advance.  But, for the most part, I understand that doctors don’t have to call.

Well, on Friday, The Heart Center called to remind me of my appointment and to do pre-registration.  That’s not really weird, since a call prior to the weekend, is normal for appointments on Mondays and Tuesdays. (Pre-registration is also pretty normal, since the Center is part of the Huntsville Hospital System, so my appointment is sort of like being checked into the hospital for a few hours.)  Well, yesterday morning I got a second call from them.  This time it was their computer system, which required me to confirm the appointment via their automated system.  About four hours later, I got another call from them.  I think that it was a person.  (My dad answered and confirmed vocally, so I’m guessing that it was a person.)  I’ve never had an appointment that required 3 confirmations before.  My mother suggested that it might be that the Center has me scheduled for multiple people or multiple procedures or something.  Who knows?

Of course the idea that I’m going to see more than 1 specialist or that I’m going to be going through procedures is a bit unnerving.  I’m used to the EKG stuff and Holter monitors being a part of my appointment, but they don’t usually do anything other than that when I visit.  There is a chance that this appointment will be different, so I guess I shouldn’t expect it to be just like the others I’ve had there.

I’m no longer certain that it is Serotonin Syndrome, since I’ve continued to have problems with my heart rate going extremely high and my blood pressure getting higher than I’ve ever seen it go before.  The high numbers are especially unexpected when earlier in the day I will have had a fairly low reading or a reading that it close to normal.  A few hours after the high reading, the lower readings will come back.

I’ve also had some massive headaches with and without the increases (and decreases) in pulse and pressure.  Yesterday, I had one of the worst headaches that I’d ever had, which is saying something since I’ve had headaches pretty constantly for 20 years or so.  This headache felt like the front of my skull, mainly in the forehead area, was going to cave in.  It also felt like there was this explosive or maybe implosive feeling in that general area.  It didn’t feel like my standard migraines, tension, and sinus headaches.  It was different, and definitely not good-different.  I know that I probably should have gotten it checked out, but if I had called my family doctor and told them, I knew that they would have suggested that I tell the cardiologist today or that I go to the emergency room.  The ER isn’t really an option.  I know that I can’t rely on them to do anything anymore.  And if I were told to just tell the cardiologist, then I would have basically wasted a phone call.

Sometimes I wish I still had a headache doctor, but I didn’t really appreciate the way that I was treated there and I didn’t like that they kept putting me on medicines that I had already had issues with.  Since there is only one headache specialist in the entire state, I guess I am kind of screwed in terms of looking for others around here.  Insurance might keep me from going to doctors elsewhere, not to mention gas prices and the angst that comes with the idea of really long drives.

Anyway, I hope that the appointment goes well today and that we figure out what the hell is going on.  Otherwise, I worry that I will worry myself to death over it.

2 comments » | Confessions, Sickness and Health

Things I Should Have Known

18
May

I got a call back from the cardiologist, regarding an appointment, right before I drifted off to sleep this morning.  My appointment is next Tuesday.  Of course, after I woke up, I figured out what I think has been causing the blood pressure and pulse stuff.

Apparently, the drugs Effexor and Tramadol can both cause Serotonin Syndrome, especially when they are taken together or are taken within a certain time period.  I knew Effexor could do it, but I wasn’t aware that Tramadol was also on the list of drugs that could cause those issues.  I’m still going to see the doctor, in case I’m wrong, but I’m fairly sure that this may be the cause of this latest set of problems.

In other (non-related) news, I just found out that my aunt (the one that I’ve had some issues with as of late) has a Facebook account.  If we were still on good terms, i.e. like we were when I was a kid, then I would add her in a heartbeat.  Now, I’m not so sure.  I mean, why should I add someone who obviously doesn’t really care about me? I guess part of me wants her to be the way she used to be, while this other part knows that she will never be that person again. She thinks she’s better than us and she has a grandson to love, instead of an insane and ill-behaved adult niece. I guess it makes sense that she would want to be around him more.

Oh, and my dad got a check from my other aunt to help with costs related to the storms from April.  That was really nice of her.  Thursday is our day that we can go to First Baptist Church and apply for D-SNAP. That’s definitely a good thing.  Both will definitely be a help to us.

Comment » | 10 Years of Madness, Facebook, Family, Sickness and Health

Suite Gothique Pour Grande Orgue

17
May

If you’ve read my blog for, oh, at least a year [1], then you should know that I’ve had some issues with tachycardia [2]. My cardiologist had said that I had an arrhythmia [3], but didn’t want to treat it because my normal blood pressure was around 100/70 or lower and because I have asthma[4]. I didn’t really like his response, but I went with it because (in part) I felt that it was the right decision. I think the tables may have turned, though.

Over the weekend, I was feeling kind of weird when I walked into the living room from the bathroom (not a long distance)[5] and I wanted to know if maybe my pulse was up. It was. The pulse was at 156. My blood pressure was at 128 over 100. (I thought at first that the top number was in the 150′s.) I got worried and, yesterday morning, I called the family doctor to see if maybe they could see me. (I really didn’t want to go back to see the cardiologist if it wasn’t absolutely necessary.)[6] One of the nurses at the family doctor’s office said that I should really talk to the cardiologist about this. She asked me to check my blood pressure while we were on the phone, and I did. My blood pressure (then) was 130 over 100. My pulse, which is what she was more worried about, was 116, then. She said to call the cardiologist, since it sounded like it was more likely something they would end up treating. I hesitated, though, because I, like I said, I really didn’t want to see him.

This morning, I decided that I needed to check my blood pressure again. I sat down next to my mom and Willow for about 20 minutes, which was longer than I had waited the past 2 times before checking it. When I checked it, it came back as 182 over 98 with a pulse of 116. That was the highest I had ever seen the top number, not just for me, but for anyone. Mom definitely felt that I should make the call to the cardiologist ASAP, which I did.

Unfortunately, when dealing with a practice with so many physicians, the wait can be really long to talk to a scheduler. It took, literally, 7 minutes to talk to a real human being. I thought that she was the scheduler, but no, she was in charge of routing the calls once you get to the department. The person I needed to talk to wasn’t available, so I ended up leaving a voice-mail. (And I know that when she hears it, she’s going to think I’m 5 because my voice sounded that squeaky and young.)[7]

I’m worried, though, which I know doesn’t help at all. Between this, the ongoing congestion-sinus crap, my period starting back a couple of weeks ago (it’s been light, so the length isn’t worrying me at all), my increasing overheating issues, my dad’s disability review being tomorrow, my mom’s neurological issues, and the regular stress that I encounter, I’ve just been quite a nervous person lately. I would say that maybe the blood pressure is high because of that, but I guess it is better to be safe than sorry.

So, now I wait.

[1] Good for you, you deserve a cookie. Of course, if you’ve read it longer, then maybe you should get a cookie cake or something.

[2] The definition came from The Mayo Clinic‘s page on tachycardia.

[3] The definition came from the National Institutes of Health‘s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute‘s page on arrhythmia.

[4] The definition came from PubMed Health from their asthma page.

[5] Unless ten feet is a long distance.

[6] He’s one of those doctors that makes it clear that he doesn’t see the point in treating overweight clients.

[7] I know that having a little kid voice isn’t really noteworthy, but it sometimes makes it hard for me to do things over the phone. People seem to be in disbelief that a person can have a little kid voice when they’re in their twenties.

Comment » | 10 Years of Madness, Confessions, Family, Sickness and Health

It’s Not All in My Head

23
February

I’m sorry but I must disagree with your assessment of the visit. I took a full history, reviewed available records and did a complete rheumatologic physical exam (which I know is more detailed than most). I ordered appropriate labs and all they are returning normal and negative for rheumatic disease. I am aware that you have musculoskeletal pain and I acknowledged that but I have no treatment for chronic undifferentiated pain syndrome. I have been practicing for > 30yrs and this has allowed me to be more efficient in my evaluations that most. Again , I would recommend that your MD have you evaluated by a pain specialist.

The exam wasn’t complete. Going through the motions isn’t a complete exam. The appropriate labs probably wouldn’t be back by now, since it generally takes more than 36 hours to get lab results back on anything other than simple tests. Pain is not the same as inflammation and it isn’t the same as all of the dryness going on everywhere. The syndrome that he mentioned in the email, which wasn’t mentioned at the appointment, is (from what I can tell) a somatoform diagnosis–meaning that it’s all in my head. So basically, I hurt, feel like crap, etc. because I’m a nutter.

The last time that a doctor diagnosed me with a somatoform illness and stuck with that diagnosis was when I was 13 and I was having problems with my gallbladder. That doctor thought that I was just really anxious and causing the stomach pain. She continued that stance after the surgery to remove the gallbladder. So, I don’t really take stock in doctors who outright say that it is all in my head. And if it were a somatoform issue, then you know what the treatment is? Therapy and anti-depressants. What have I been going through on near-constant basis since I was 16 and off-and-on since I was 13. Yeah, those two things.

Now, it could be that I’m just crazy, but I really don’t think so. (I know that’s supposed to be part of the whole diagnosis with the problem.) I just don’t think it’s possible for me to fake this much stuff. I think it’s more likely that the doctor is just an arrogant ass who didn’t care to look into what might be going on.

4 comments » | Confessions, Rants, Sickness and Health, So Damn Special

« Previous Entries     

↑ Back to top