Jeez Louise

I have to tell you, I am *so* glad it’s Friday. Yes I realize this was the first week back after vacation so I should be all relaxed, and I am, but this week has been a difficult one for a few reasons and I kind of just want to be like a vegetable for a couple of days.

Last week, on Wednesday, I was sitting on the couch doing some knitting when I noticed my heart was doing something. I wasn’t sure if it was racing or skipping or both, but it did it, for about 10 seconds. Then it stopped. About three hours later, it did the same thing again. Nothing big. On Thursday, it happened a bit more often – but there was still a long pause in between. Now, it wasn’t going faster when I was exercising or anything. Just when I was sitting up. Or standing. When I would lay down, it would go away.
It began to get more frequent, though, and by Saturday it was happening pretty much every second that I wasn’t laying down. On Saturday evening, Rob insisted that I go to Outpatients and see what was going on.

At Outpatients, I was hooked up to an EKG machine, and told to “lay down and relax”. I told them that my heart was only doing anything when I was standing or sitting up, but they said that I had to be laying down for their machine to work. Rob read to me while I lay there perfectly still for two hours. In a completely open room (they did close the curtains when they hooked up all the monitor things, because hi, my boobs would be out and there were children around, but after that? Wide open). The kid across from me was playing Nintendo Wii bowling and I was kind of wishing I could join him because holy crap was this boring. The machine took my blood pressure every half hour – it was super low, like 50/90 at some points. My heart was up over 100 bpm, which is considered fast. They took blood to test for thyroid problems, but that came back fine.

After about two hours, a doctor came in (I hadn’t seen a doctor up until that point) and told me that there was nothing wrong, that my heart was probably going fast because of my puffers. They said that if it continued for much longer, I should make an appointment with my family doctor and go from there.

Well, it kept going, so I called my doctor’s office on Monday morning. They had a cancellation on Wednesday afternoon. I haven’t actually seen my doctor in probably more than a year, so I had a huge list of things I wanted to talk to her about. First thing was my heart – she told me that I have been on those same puffers for years, so there’s no reason that they would cause my heart to race. She decided that at some point I’d be hooked up to a portable heart monitor for three days (when one’s available from the hospital) and we’d see if it was still happening. Next she said “So, you haven’t managed to get pregnant…” so I explained all the business about my jacked up uterus. She’s been my doctor since I was five, so I let her go on about adoption for awhile as if she was the first person who’d ever suggested it and I knew absolutely nothing about it. Then we moved on to the other things on my list (are you interested in my list? Here we go: heartburn, and this thing that popped up on my forehead – turns out it’s a mole, oh lucky me) and then I came home.

Long story even longer: my heart hasn’t really stopped doing the weird thing, and worrying about it exhausts me. I’m glad it’s the weekend, because I love laying still. My dogs are cute. My husband is cuter. That is all.