Heart pounding at night?

[Nocturne]

Way back when I first got myself a GP, at the age of 40, I was a bit concerned about two things -- one of my legs seemed to have a cramp that would not go away (this went away entirely after a while, maybe because I lost a lot of weight), and I had noticed that when I lay down to sleep at night my heart would pound for a few minutes. It would then go away.

Doc pooh poohed this initially because "at your age" you'd have to be some kind of circus freak I guess to have any serious heart trouble. It wasn't until a year later that he heart the murmur that revealed AS.

By then I had lost 60 pounds and gone from obese to just barely overweight (by 2-3 pounds). The nightly pounding had gone away.

But in the last week or so it seems to have returned. It feels like my heart is not just beating but banging away in my chest. Also happens when I wake up as well as when I lay down to bed. Not really when I walk or exercise though (no more than usual).

Is this typical with AS? Is it significant of anything?

I had a cardio stress test a few months ago and everything turned out normal. I think my docs think I'm a bit over worried but then again they also thought my concerns about my CAC score were unfounded and it turned out that they were dead wrong.

 

[epstns]

If it is indicative of anything, then I'm in trouble right with you, Nocturne. Ever since my valve replacement I have been aware that when I get into bed I feel my heart beating hard and quickly for some seconds before it settles down. I always attributed it to my pacemaker, thinking that the motion of plopping down on my back might have been triggering one of the activity sensors in the pacemaker, elevating my heart rate. None of my docs are concerned about it, and it doesn't always happen, so I've just logged it as an artifact and moved on.

I know that a lot of our internal organs move around as we move our bodies, so maybe for some of us our hearts or aortas just lean up against something else at times, allowing us to "feel" our pulse in unusual ways.