Hmmm...Heart Attack, You Say?

First off, wow! I managed to post every night this week! I'm so impressed with myself, lol. I hope I'm starting a habit here.

Now, Saturdays are supposed to be health updates. I decided 2009 would be my year to get healthy. Finally lose the weight and get to wear baby tees ten years after they've gone out of style. Judging from the past month, maybe I should have started this health thing earlier...

The past month my blood pressure has skyrocketed. Most people would blame it on the fact that I teach sixth grade. Well, this is one thing for which my little "angels" have no responsibility. The past week, I've had random pains in my chest, neck, jaw, and shoulders, as well as having a hard time breathing and extremely high blood pressure. Several nights this week I've gone to bed with the fear that I wasn't waking up in the morning, because I felt so bad. Tuesday night/Wednesday was the worst. I felt awful that day. It was so bad, I stopped by the fire station on the way home, because my best friend was on duty. He's a paramedic, and I let him hook me up to the EKG machine in the ambulance. Yeah, if you know me, you know it had to have been bad for me to allow him to do that. The fear on his face when I was explaining everything made me worry all the more. If he was concerned, that scared me more. That night almost took me to the hospital. I ended up, thankfully, getting ahold of a doctor friend in Maine. He was able to get me set back up on my meds, which I was lacking down here, not having insurance to have a doctor. This is why I never went to the emergency room, although I should have.

FYI: Did you know that a lot of women have different symptoms of heart attack than men? A lot of times, we women don't have the chest grabbing, I can't breath, I can't feel my left arm symptoms. Some symptoms of the "silent heart attack": shortness of breath (check), nausea (check), vomiting, pain in jaw, chest, shoulder, arm, back (check to all except back), unusual fatigue (check), indigestion, gas pains (check), heartburn, anxiety (check), sweating, lightheadedness (check), and, believe it or not, an impending sense of doom (um, not waking up in the morning? check). Those, of course, are not all of them, but a lot. As you can tell, I had a lot of the symptoms. In fact, my doctor friend told me, from what I had described, that it was very likely I had had a very small heart attack earlier this week. Scary much?

Of course, my first thought was, wait a minute. I'm 28 years old! I can't be having a heart attack! But it can happen. My family is riddled with heart disease. It killed my grandfathers (both Dad and Mom's fathers)...it killed my aunt (Mom's sister)...my mom has heart issues...my dad has heart issues. Between family genetics and the way I've cared for myself over the years, it was only a matter of time.

So that's my story. As I sit here typing this, I'm still feeling little pains here and there, and sometimes it's a little hard to get a full breath. But after being on my meds again for the past four days, I'm feeling a bit better. We've also decided to bump me up another pill to hit the blood pressure more aggressively. All in all, I would really appreciate your prayers. For someone my age with no health insurance to be dealing with this, I am still a bit scared about how this is all going to pan out.

There is a good part of this week, though. I've lost 8 pounds this week! Yay!! ;) Love y'all!