A Little Scare

Ok, so I take my health for granted. I rarely get sick and when I do go to the doc - all my tests are normal for my age and weight.

On Tuesday at work I was sitting in a project review meeting with my whole team and my chest started to really feel tight. I've felt a milder form of this before - I think it's related to heartburn or acid reflux. I got up from the meeting, went to my desk and got a Zantac, and took it with a glass of water - that's always taken care of this before.

I went back to my meeting and my chest was still really tight - starting to hurt pretty bad - I realised that one of my co-workers was asking if I was alright. Instead of saying "yeah, I'm ok" which truely was what I was going to say - I think I said "no, I don't think so"

To make a long story shorter - I ended up on the couch in the quiet room until the pretty firefighters and EMTs came to take me away to the hospital. I spent the night and all of yesterday getting checked out. We did a full cardio workup and from all we were able to determine - it's probably not my heart.

I'm on a different proton pump blocker and will follow up with my PCP next week.

The cardio doc and I talked about two different things - What is causing the current pain and how to keep it from being my heart.

We are starting with the new proton pump in inhibitor - if I go the whole two week therapy without any more pain - that will tell us that it's gastro in nature and we can treat that. If I do have the pain again during treatment - then we have to do some more tests - perhaps an endoscope to look at the esophagus or a heart cath to see what the heart is doing in more detail.

My cholesterol is on the high side of normal and he wants me to start walking a couple of times a week - to get my heart rate up a little - he thinks that will bring the cholesterol right down to where it needs to be. That's going to be the hard part.