After the day my world came crashing
down I awoke at 5am the next morning to my husband asking me how I felt and asking
if he needed to stay home from work with me. I told him no, I thought I felt
ok. I finally awakened for the day at 7am. I felt ok, nothing weird as of yet.
I went about my normal routine…cup of coffee on the patio, checking email,
having my morning cig. (yes, I still smoke, again please don’t judge). A few minutes
into my morning routine, my body started going haywire again. I called my
husband and told him, “It’s happening again”, he told me he was leaving work
right then and to hang in there he’d be right home (in about 30 minutes). After
hanging up with him, I called the cardiologist on her cell, yes, at 7am. I
explained my situation, the racing heart rate, the tingling, the rigidity of my
facial muscles and feeling like I was about to pass out. I again asked if the
medication might be the culprit. She thought that this wasn’t the case and told me that if I
felt like I was passing out to have the kids call 911. I told her that my
husband was on his way home from work and she told me that if I still felt the
same when he got home to head to the ER.
Needless, to say, an hour later, I
found myself in the ER. My heart rate was 144. Luckily, they took me right in,
relatively speaking (they don’t mess around with the heart). I lay in the ER
bed feeling again like I could sleep for a lifetime. They gave me one of those
patch things to slow my heart rate down. I lay there for a while dozing in and
out wondering what on earth was going on with me. Then the nurse came in to
give me a pill, I asked what it was for and she told me it was to lower my
heart rate. Then she said she needed to cut it in half; even though the doctor
had prescribed the whole pill, she took it upon herself to give me just half as
“she has seen what a whole pill can do to a person”. At first, I had no idea
what she was talking about and I was so out of it, I didn’t know up from down.
Later I would find out that had she given me the whole pill, I probably
wouldn’t be here writing this blog. My heart rate went down to 30 (on half the
pill, imagine what a whole one would have done!) The alarm kept going off and
when I finally awoke from my foggy state I asked the nurse, if a heart rate of 30
was normal, because it seemed low to me; she expressed that yes, 30 was low.
That’s when they took off that patch (nitro-something). I will always hold
nurses in the highest regard, especially the one that potentially saved my
life.
A bit later they said that they were
admitting me into the hospital for observation. Meanwhile, my husband was at
home with the kids getting them situated with some friends as we have no family
around where we live. Actually, now that I think about it, my in-laws were in
town, but they were working (that’s another story). They came by the ER after
work to visit and to pray with me. I couldn’t help the nagging feeling though
that they were looking at me like I was some kind of weirdo and thinking that I
should just “buck up”. Don’t ask me why I felt this way; I was really out of it
at the time. After they left I was alone in a hospital not knowing what was
happening to me. This was possibly the loneliest moment of my life. The
hospital set me up in a room complete with beeping monitors hours after I had
entered the ER. Still they had no idea what was going on. My husband came back
with some essentials only to get back home to deal with the kids and the
animals.
Later in the evening, an electrophysiologist
came into my room to explain some things to me. Don’t even ask me to remember
all he said as most days I can’t remember what I had for breakfast. In fact,
it’s amazing all the things I do remember about this horrible ordeal. At any
rate, I remember him saying that I didn’t have high blood pressure or high
cholesterol and I should stop taking the medication that the cardiologist had
put me on immediately. He didn’t have to tell me twice! I also remember him
telling me to set up an appointment at his office to get a Holter Monitor. He
wanted to monitor my heart for 21 days and then we’d go from there. He asked me
if I had ever fainted and I told him, one time when I was a teenager.
The next morning the attending ER
doctor came in to discharge me, again telling me that from my blood work and
various tests that I, in fact, did not have high blood pressure nor did I have
high cholesterol and to stop taking the medication that I had been prescribed.
I guess I was told twice!! He then looked up the medication on his hand-held
doohickey and showed me some side effects of the medication I was on; both meds
could cause tachycardia and arrhythmias.
Hmmmm…
By the way, the original cardiologist
never showed up at the hospital. Don’t know why, she knew I was there as I gave
her name and number to the ER nurse. Her practice is in a different county
although the hospitals in her county are owned by the same hospitals in our
county. Go figure. I never saw her again although I did speak to her on the
phone once after my ER visit.
To this day, my husband and I wonder
if the medication that the cardiologist put me on (Norvasc 10mg) might have
brought my blood pressure down too low thus, initiating the tachycardia. We may
never know. There is also the question of why my heart rate was going up for no
apparent reason before I even saw the cardiologist.
Questions, questions, and more
questions…sadly not as many answers.
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