G
Guest
Hello all, and thanks for listening.
My story started 2 years ago (although if I think back, there are signs since childhood I will mention later). I was 38 years old, and working for a company that suddenly decided to close down. This was 2 weeks before Christmas, and we found out on Jan 1, 2013 we would be unemployed. As a single source of income for my family, I was pretty stressed. But, I had always had success before finding new jobs so I took on the challenge. I thought it would be smart to "load up" on interviews, giving myself the most options. So much so, that I even had one week where I had five long interviews in 4 days (two in one day). I'm also going to add that for 18 months before the job loss, I had been getting VERY fit. I had lost 50 pounds over 2 years following a Paleo diet, and doing CrossFit. By November, I had hit my goal weight of 215 (from 267 a few years earlier), and was doing Crossfit workouts, eating clean whole foods and was able to run a 5K in about 8-9 minute miles. Nothing special, but for a guy who used to only be able to run 1 mile at 12 minute pace, I had come a long way.
I am a computer programmer for a living, but an aging one ... meaning I am no longer the youngster who is up on the latest and greatest coding techniques. So this time around, as the expensive veteran, I was having a harder go at it. I was told by some "you seem a little rusty on your skills", and by others that I was overqualified or too expensive. I later found out this was just bad luck but at the time I began to think my star was falling. On a Friday following the 5 interviews in 4 days, I was off and taking a nice morning shower, when out of the blue I got hit with what I have been describing as an arrhythmia. In the shower my heart started to flip flop, and it seemed to be missing beats or beating in a random sequence. At the same time, I got light headed, and felt weak. All my life I had been hit with random one-time skipped beats that would happen at random a few times per year, but this one persisted, and it scared the heck out of me. I tried to cough (this sensation makes me feel compelled to cough to fix it), but to no avail. Got out of the shower, wet and naked, and went into a panic. I texted my wife who was at work that I thought I was having a heart attack and to rush home. I tried to lay down on my bed and be calm, but that seemed to amplify the effects. After a minute or 3 (lost track of time), it resolved itself, but I was left in a state of panic.
Needless to say, when my wife got home we decided to head to the ER. I was feeling better within 10 mins so then I redirected her to the walk in clinic. By the time we got there, I felt normal, and didnt want to wait for 40 mins in a sick room. So we went home. I chalked this up to anxiety (and to this day I still think that may be all it was). But my brain was now changed, and I had a fear I had a heart issue. Sure enough, a couple of nights later I got more of these arrhythmia palps that lasted for about 10 seconds. This again scared the heck out of me, and around 1 Am that night I had my wife bring me to the ER.
I had the ECG, blood tests, an X-Ray done. Docs listened to the heart, and said everything was fine. As they told me, I felt better. Could it just be anxiety??
The next 2 years were all over the place. I would have periods where I felt better. For a bit I tried to go back to Crossfit again, a little out of shape after having taken 3 months off and having put 10+ on. But after one night where I got some palpitations during the warm ups and panicked, I decided to ease off the hardcore exercising. I still felt my heart was telling me something. Over the next 2 years, I would have periods where anxiety was very high, and I could hear my heart pounding. I would wake up feeling OK, but within a few minutes of getting out of bed my mind would train on my heart. I would try to ignore it, but couldn't. I went to a Cardiologist without even asking for a referral. He say me down, listened to my heart and looked at my 30 second long ECG, and said everything sounded great. He said if I wanted, he would schedule me for a stress test, and I accepted. He also gave me a prescription for Lorazepam saying it was anxiety in his mind. I sort of ran out and just got the Rx filled and tried it. Took it every day. Helped a little, but in time I found myself feeling crashes from the low dose and it would make anxiety hit. I wondered if it was just making the anxiety worse. I did the stress test, Bruce protocal, and from what I remember did very well. I want to say I made it through 6 or so segments, and was running pretty hard uphill toward the end. The crossfit and running had paid off. The test seemed fine, no issues. I felt a little better.
But symptoms did not subside. I continued to have heart pangs, aches and sometimes just soreness in the chest area. Sometimes it would be at the sternum based between the nipples (on a guy). Other times, I would feel aches up higher, around where the collarbones come together below the throat. Of course, other times I would feel aches off to my right side, or just under my right shoulder, and the fact these things moved around made me think I must be manifesting them in my head. But there were other things. Playing golf, I noticed when walking the course, big hills left me very winded. More so than my peers - or at least it seemed. Granted I had also packed back on pounds. Maybe back to the 240s at this time. And I also wondered if anxiety and panic were making me feel breathless when I walked up the hills. I grew to fear them, even rented a cart to play 9 holes a few times and said it was a knee issue. I remember walking up 4 large flights of stairs ar Grand Central station from the lower levels because the escalator was broken, with a backpack, and it was a scary thing. I was in the middle of a stairway with a hundred other people like cattle, none of them wanted to stop. I wanted to stop, I was getting breathless, but the cattle behind me and hundreds of people made me keep going. I wondered if this was the silly way I was going to die. I got to the top and was mildly gasping for air. I looked at other people, older people even, and they seemed fine. Was this anxiety and panic or a symptom?
Sometimes I will feel short of breath. Sometimes not. Sometimes I can feel my heart beat, and literally feel the flaps closing. Other times not. I struggle with trying to deduce whether or not it's just anxiety causing the symptoms, or do the symptoms trigger the anxiety? Either way, what scared me was that up to age 38, aside from being a little bit of a hypochondriac, I never had these issues. They hit out of the blue.
One thing that bothered me with my cardiologist, at least in my head, was that he never really LOOKED at anything inside me. Just the ECG, the stethescope and the stress test ECG. He also gave me a 24 hour Holter monitor but nothing really happened in those 24 hours. My arrhythmia type issues over these 2 years would happen at random, and it may be many months before one happened, and when it does happen, it lasts either 1 second, or like 10 seconds (the latter scare me more than the former, which I had even in teen years).
I went back to my GP this year for my physical, and told him I still wasn't feeling right. I could feel my heart at times, very anxious, sometimes mild chest pain that I couldn't tell if was muscular or from the heart itself. I told him my libido was low, and felt tired. I asked him about testosterone. So we had that checked, and low and behold, it came back very low. Now, was my low T a cause of my anxiety symptoms? Or was chronic anxiety driving down my T? Not sure, but thankfully my young doctor felt that I didn't seem like the overly anxious type, and he wanted to check a number of things to be safe - I told him I wanted to go back to a cardiologist and at least do an echo. I was worried I had some kind of enlarged heart or something ... but looking at it made sense to me. So he sent me to a different cardiologist that specializes in eletrical issues of the heart to maybe explain the arrhythmias and skipped beats. We did the ECG, another stress test and an echo.
This time around, I found out that from my echo, they saw that I had Bicuspid Aortic Valve. The cardiologist telling me that day wasn't my cardiologist, just his partner, and he literally have me a 120 second rundown. He said your valve looks fine, no issues. Good to go, and that many people live their whole lives without even knowing they had it. I guess that was great news, but he didn't answer many of the questions I had in my head, and I was still stunned from the fact that I was born with a defective heart valve, no less the one that leads to the aorta, which I knew enough about human biology that it was fairly important. So I walked out in a daze, with very little info to go on. Of course, I googled for BAV that day when I got home, and that's when I started to panic again. The Cleveland Clinic page on BAVD makes it sound like all of us are just open heart surgery patients waiting to happen, and that aside from the valve itself (which came with a pick your poison decision on artificial valve or short-lifespan biological pig valve), that all sorts of aortic issues could exist (or both!). So naturally I was then convinced that even though the valve looked good, maybe my aorta is sending these warning signs in the forms of aches and such?
So I called back the next morning and asked to speak to MY cardiologist. He made the time for me and answered about 10 questions I had. In a nutshell, he said my valve looks totally fine. Bloodflow and such looks like that of a normal 3 flap valve. I asked about the aorta, and he said the aortic root looked normal, the heart size and chambers seemed normal. I asked about weight lifting (which I do), and cardio exercise, and he said multiple times "no limitations" and that we would just check back on it at some point in the future. I asked about my children, and should they be checked. He didn't think that was worth the anxiety it might cause them (they are 14, 12 and 8, and all girls). I told him my oldest, who had been a 2-sport star between ages 5 and 14, had shown signs of always being tired on the court/field, and she even passed out once in the middle of a practice. Collapsed! I was there, it scared the heck out of me, but we chalked it up to dehydration and the fact she hadn't eaten all day because she had a stomach virus the previous two days. He seemed more concerned about that, but still felt it wasn't worth checking her at this stage. In the last year, she has quit soccer, and now is about to quit basketball, and its clear to me that she is out of shape and hates the running part of it. Which reminds me of myself at her age.
So, that brings me back to my childhood. I was an athlete too. I played all the sports as a youngster, and then widdled it down to baseball as a teenager, and even went on to play baseball in college. I always noticed in my late teens and even in college that my cardio stamina was never normal. I was great for short bursts of energy, but run a mile? After 2-3 minutes I began to feel like I wasn't getting enough oxygen and would always fade away. I just assumed some people are built for endurance, some aren't. Like I said, I worked my way to a 8:30 mile pace for a 5K, but that was extremely tough on me. Max heart rate, etc.
Crossfit was even worse. The workouts there are intense, such as 15 minutes of high intensity stuff non stop. There were times where at the end I would drop to the floor, lay on my back and feel my heart POUNDING in my throat, gasping for air. Man, if I knew then what I know now I don't think I would have stayed with that. I did it for almost 2 years! Sometimes my upper chest would be sore the next day, but I passed that off back then as lung expansion, no biggie. Maybe that is all it was.
So now here I stand. I am 40, diagnosed with a very scary BAV. I think about that little fish mouth now and it freaks me out. I went to the gym today and was doing some dips and got off and felt my heart pounding, and I thought of the little engine that could in there, my little fish mouth valve. Freaks me out. Or is the valve fine and my aorta isn't? They mentioned the echo looked at the "aortic root" and it seemed normal, but I'm sure there are people who have issues further than that. My fantasy is that I can live my whole life with my little engine that could valve and there would be no issues. My next choice would be that sure, when I am in my 60s and my kids are through college and such, that I can have something dealt with and the latest and greatest technologies will make it that much easier and safer. My fear is that something may arise soon, and/or worse, that the doctors continue to miss and overlook things.
Are my symptoms real? I'm glad that I kept pushing my doctors to check and recheck my heart. My instincts were right. I had 3-4 different doctors tell me everything was perfect. None of the experienced cardiologists heard anything close to a murmur or sound from my valve. I also have a sleep apnea sleep study planned in case that was contributing to my anxiety or low T levels. I'm taking clomid for the low T. Instead of injecting testosterone, I am taking a womens fertility drug that supposedly tells your pituitary to make more T (and LH and FSH and estrogen) to see if you can jumpstart things naturally. But I still wonder if the low T is just from the chronic long term stress and anxiety of the last 2 years. having said that, I feel more energy and less fatigue on the clomid so far.
My wife has been very non-understanding. She keeps accusing me of just being anxious, thinks I am fine because the doc said I was, and wants me to get over it. I can't tell you how much this bothers me ... when she thought she had breast cancer, I was very careful to stay positive for her, but also let her vent and talk and be supportive. That's not her way, she takes the other approach, doesn't want to hear it. This just makes me feel worse and that I have no one to talk to about the fears or concerns. So I keep it all inside, hide this all from my kids (who sometimes wonder why dad doesnt feel like playing with them), and suffer one day at a time.
If you read through all of this, thank you so much for getting this far. It is cathartic just to get this out there, especially with a group of people who are likely to overlap in issues and understand my fears.
My story started 2 years ago (although if I think back, there are signs since childhood I will mention later). I was 38 years old, and working for a company that suddenly decided to close down. This was 2 weeks before Christmas, and we found out on Jan 1, 2013 we would be unemployed. As a single source of income for my family, I was pretty stressed. But, I had always had success before finding new jobs so I took on the challenge. I thought it would be smart to "load up" on interviews, giving myself the most options. So much so, that I even had one week where I had five long interviews in 4 days (two in one day). I'm also going to add that for 18 months before the job loss, I had been getting VERY fit. I had lost 50 pounds over 2 years following a Paleo diet, and doing CrossFit. By November, I had hit my goal weight of 215 (from 267 a few years earlier), and was doing Crossfit workouts, eating clean whole foods and was able to run a 5K in about 8-9 minute miles. Nothing special, but for a guy who used to only be able to run 1 mile at 12 minute pace, I had come a long way.
I am a computer programmer for a living, but an aging one ... meaning I am no longer the youngster who is up on the latest and greatest coding techniques. So this time around, as the expensive veteran, I was having a harder go at it. I was told by some "you seem a little rusty on your skills", and by others that I was overqualified or too expensive. I later found out this was just bad luck but at the time I began to think my star was falling. On a Friday following the 5 interviews in 4 days, I was off and taking a nice morning shower, when out of the blue I got hit with what I have been describing as an arrhythmia. In the shower my heart started to flip flop, and it seemed to be missing beats or beating in a random sequence. At the same time, I got light headed, and felt weak. All my life I had been hit with random one-time skipped beats that would happen at random a few times per year, but this one persisted, and it scared the heck out of me. I tried to cough (this sensation makes me feel compelled to cough to fix it), but to no avail. Got out of the shower, wet and naked, and went into a panic. I texted my wife who was at work that I thought I was having a heart attack and to rush home. I tried to lay down on my bed and be calm, but that seemed to amplify the effects. After a minute or 3 (lost track of time), it resolved itself, but I was left in a state of panic.
Needless to say, when my wife got home we decided to head to the ER. I was feeling better within 10 mins so then I redirected her to the walk in clinic. By the time we got there, I felt normal, and didnt want to wait for 40 mins in a sick room. So we went home. I chalked this up to anxiety (and to this day I still think that may be all it was). But my brain was now changed, and I had a fear I had a heart issue. Sure enough, a couple of nights later I got more of these arrhythmia palps that lasted for about 10 seconds. This again scared the heck out of me, and around 1 Am that night I had my wife bring me to the ER.
I had the ECG, blood tests, an X-Ray done. Docs listened to the heart, and said everything was fine. As they told me, I felt better. Could it just be anxiety??
The next 2 years were all over the place. I would have periods where I felt better. For a bit I tried to go back to Crossfit again, a little out of shape after having taken 3 months off and having put 10+ on. But after one night where I got some palpitations during the warm ups and panicked, I decided to ease off the hardcore exercising. I still felt my heart was telling me something. Over the next 2 years, I would have periods where anxiety was very high, and I could hear my heart pounding. I would wake up feeling OK, but within a few minutes of getting out of bed my mind would train on my heart. I would try to ignore it, but couldn't. I went to a Cardiologist without even asking for a referral. He say me down, listened to my heart and looked at my 30 second long ECG, and said everything sounded great. He said if I wanted, he would schedule me for a stress test, and I accepted. He also gave me a prescription for Lorazepam saying it was anxiety in his mind. I sort of ran out and just got the Rx filled and tried it. Took it every day. Helped a little, but in time I found myself feeling crashes from the low dose and it would make anxiety hit. I wondered if it was just making the anxiety worse. I did the stress test, Bruce protocal, and from what I remember did very well. I want to say I made it through 6 or so segments, and was running pretty hard uphill toward the end. The crossfit and running had paid off. The test seemed fine, no issues. I felt a little better.
But symptoms did not subside. I continued to have heart pangs, aches and sometimes just soreness in the chest area. Sometimes it would be at the sternum based between the nipples (on a guy). Other times, I would feel aches up higher, around where the collarbones come together below the throat. Of course, other times I would feel aches off to my right side, or just under my right shoulder, and the fact these things moved around made me think I must be manifesting them in my head. But there were other things. Playing golf, I noticed when walking the course, big hills left me very winded. More so than my peers - or at least it seemed. Granted I had also packed back on pounds. Maybe back to the 240s at this time. And I also wondered if anxiety and panic were making me feel breathless when I walked up the hills. I grew to fear them, even rented a cart to play 9 holes a few times and said it was a knee issue. I remember walking up 4 large flights of stairs ar Grand Central station from the lower levels because the escalator was broken, with a backpack, and it was a scary thing. I was in the middle of a stairway with a hundred other people like cattle, none of them wanted to stop. I wanted to stop, I was getting breathless, but the cattle behind me and hundreds of people made me keep going. I wondered if this was the silly way I was going to die. I got to the top and was mildly gasping for air. I looked at other people, older people even, and they seemed fine. Was this anxiety and panic or a symptom?
Sometimes I will feel short of breath. Sometimes not. Sometimes I can feel my heart beat, and literally feel the flaps closing. Other times not. I struggle with trying to deduce whether or not it's just anxiety causing the symptoms, or do the symptoms trigger the anxiety? Either way, what scared me was that up to age 38, aside from being a little bit of a hypochondriac, I never had these issues. They hit out of the blue.
One thing that bothered me with my cardiologist, at least in my head, was that he never really LOOKED at anything inside me. Just the ECG, the stethescope and the stress test ECG. He also gave me a 24 hour Holter monitor but nothing really happened in those 24 hours. My arrhythmia type issues over these 2 years would happen at random, and it may be many months before one happened, and when it does happen, it lasts either 1 second, or like 10 seconds (the latter scare me more than the former, which I had even in teen years).
I went back to my GP this year for my physical, and told him I still wasn't feeling right. I could feel my heart at times, very anxious, sometimes mild chest pain that I couldn't tell if was muscular or from the heart itself. I told him my libido was low, and felt tired. I asked him about testosterone. So we had that checked, and low and behold, it came back very low. Now, was my low T a cause of my anxiety symptoms? Or was chronic anxiety driving down my T? Not sure, but thankfully my young doctor felt that I didn't seem like the overly anxious type, and he wanted to check a number of things to be safe - I told him I wanted to go back to a cardiologist and at least do an echo. I was worried I had some kind of enlarged heart or something ... but looking at it made sense to me. So he sent me to a different cardiologist that specializes in eletrical issues of the heart to maybe explain the arrhythmias and skipped beats. We did the ECG, another stress test and an echo.
This time around, I found out that from my echo, they saw that I had Bicuspid Aortic Valve. The cardiologist telling me that day wasn't my cardiologist, just his partner, and he literally have me a 120 second rundown. He said your valve looks fine, no issues. Good to go, and that many people live their whole lives without even knowing they had it. I guess that was great news, but he didn't answer many of the questions I had in my head, and I was still stunned from the fact that I was born with a defective heart valve, no less the one that leads to the aorta, which I knew enough about human biology that it was fairly important. So I walked out in a daze, with very little info to go on. Of course, I googled for BAV that day when I got home, and that's when I started to panic again. The Cleveland Clinic page on BAVD makes it sound like all of us are just open heart surgery patients waiting to happen, and that aside from the valve itself (which came with a pick your poison decision on artificial valve or short-lifespan biological pig valve), that all sorts of aortic issues could exist (or both!). So naturally I was then convinced that even though the valve looked good, maybe my aorta is sending these warning signs in the forms of aches and such?
So I called back the next morning and asked to speak to MY cardiologist. He made the time for me and answered about 10 questions I had. In a nutshell, he said my valve looks totally fine. Bloodflow and such looks like that of a normal 3 flap valve. I asked about the aorta, and he said the aortic root looked normal, the heart size and chambers seemed normal. I asked about weight lifting (which I do), and cardio exercise, and he said multiple times "no limitations" and that we would just check back on it at some point in the future. I asked about my children, and should they be checked. He didn't think that was worth the anxiety it might cause them (they are 14, 12 and 8, and all girls). I told him my oldest, who had been a 2-sport star between ages 5 and 14, had shown signs of always being tired on the court/field, and she even passed out once in the middle of a practice. Collapsed! I was there, it scared the heck out of me, but we chalked it up to dehydration and the fact she hadn't eaten all day because she had a stomach virus the previous two days. He seemed more concerned about that, but still felt it wasn't worth checking her at this stage. In the last year, she has quit soccer, and now is about to quit basketball, and its clear to me that she is out of shape and hates the running part of it. Which reminds me of myself at her age.
So, that brings me back to my childhood. I was an athlete too. I played all the sports as a youngster, and then widdled it down to baseball as a teenager, and even went on to play baseball in college. I always noticed in my late teens and even in college that my cardio stamina was never normal. I was great for short bursts of energy, but run a mile? After 2-3 minutes I began to feel like I wasn't getting enough oxygen and would always fade away. I just assumed some people are built for endurance, some aren't. Like I said, I worked my way to a 8:30 mile pace for a 5K, but that was extremely tough on me. Max heart rate, etc.
Crossfit was even worse. The workouts there are intense, such as 15 minutes of high intensity stuff non stop. There were times where at the end I would drop to the floor, lay on my back and feel my heart POUNDING in my throat, gasping for air. Man, if I knew then what I know now I don't think I would have stayed with that. I did it for almost 2 years! Sometimes my upper chest would be sore the next day, but I passed that off back then as lung expansion, no biggie. Maybe that is all it was.
So now here I stand. I am 40, diagnosed with a very scary BAV. I think about that little fish mouth now and it freaks me out. I went to the gym today and was doing some dips and got off and felt my heart pounding, and I thought of the little engine that could in there, my little fish mouth valve. Freaks me out. Or is the valve fine and my aorta isn't? They mentioned the echo looked at the "aortic root" and it seemed normal, but I'm sure there are people who have issues further than that. My fantasy is that I can live my whole life with my little engine that could valve and there would be no issues. My next choice would be that sure, when I am in my 60s and my kids are through college and such, that I can have something dealt with and the latest and greatest technologies will make it that much easier and safer. My fear is that something may arise soon, and/or worse, that the doctors continue to miss and overlook things.
Are my symptoms real? I'm glad that I kept pushing my doctors to check and recheck my heart. My instincts were right. I had 3-4 different doctors tell me everything was perfect. None of the experienced cardiologists heard anything close to a murmur or sound from my valve. I also have a sleep apnea sleep study planned in case that was contributing to my anxiety or low T levels. I'm taking clomid for the low T. Instead of injecting testosterone, I am taking a womens fertility drug that supposedly tells your pituitary to make more T (and LH and FSH and estrogen) to see if you can jumpstart things naturally. But I still wonder if the low T is just from the chronic long term stress and anxiety of the last 2 years. having said that, I feel more energy and less fatigue on the clomid so far.
My wife has been very non-understanding. She keeps accusing me of just being anxious, thinks I am fine because the doc said I was, and wants me to get over it. I can't tell you how much this bothers me ... when she thought she had breast cancer, I was very careful to stay positive for her, but also let her vent and talk and be supportive. That's not her way, she takes the other approach, doesn't want to hear it. This just makes me feel worse and that I have no one to talk to about the fears or concerns. So I keep it all inside, hide this all from my kids (who sometimes wonder why dad doesnt feel like playing with them), and suffer one day at a time.
If you read through all of this, thank you so much for getting this far. It is cathartic just to get this out there, especially with a group of people who are likely to overlap in issues and understand my fears.
