Issues of the heart

No, literally... so weird things happened over the past several weeks. About 3 weeks ago, I started feeling really weird occasionally, noticably when I was at complete rest. I would feel kind of anxious/panicy, and get a feeling in my chest like when you are scared by something suddenly, or just in a car and drop too fast. I noticed it a couple times over an hour, and happened to be feeling my pulse once when it happened.

At that point, I realized my pulse was actually irregular during those times... specifically, it felt like my heart just skipped a beat. Basically it would be in perfect rhythm: ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump ... then suddenly... it would just... miss a beat... ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump, silence, ba-bump, ba-bump. Perfectly timed, the other beats right where they should be. This obviously worried me a bit, I was wondering if at any moment it might just decide not to keep going. Not a good feeling. Couple that with the huge rush of anxiety that came sympathetically during each beat, and the fact that the beat that followed felt like a heavy drum beat in my chest, and I got more worried. Sometimes it would happen very occasionally, once every few minutes, sometimes it happened in fast succession, like miss, hit, miss, hit, hit, hit, hit, miss. Often happened multiple times a minute.

I am VERY active, and I don't THINK it was happening when I was actually working out, only when I was somewhat at rest. It might be I just didn't notice it, but I don't think so. This kept up for about a week, and I finally went to a doctor about it.

Of course, it happened a number of times while I was at the doctor's office. But it never actually happened while anyone was paying attention. They did an EKG, it didn't happen then either... but other than that, had a full checkup, and everything seemed really good, so I was sent to a lab to get some bloodwork done. I never got any results from that, so I assume it was good. Heart palpitations can be serious, but apparently a lot of people have what (they can only guess that) I have... 10% of all issues related to heart palpitations are completely healthy, with no known cause... just the heart gets a bit over-anxious and beats too soon... almost immediately after the last full beat... since the heart has almost no blood in it for this beat, it is almost imperceptible, but your body maintains the normal rhythm, and the next beat doesn't come until it was supposed to... so it SEEMS like the heart misses a beat, and the following one is much harder because the heart has so much blood in it.

I don't know, that just doesn't seem right to me, but I was given an 'excellent' bill of health, so I can only assume that's true. It's very annoying, though, because the rush of chemicals in the brain and body each time this happens really makes you edgy, if something DID scare me right at that point, I might just die of an endorphin overdose. :) Well, ok, that's my own very non-medical diagnosis of what might happen.

Well, now the good but weird thing. After 2 weeks and 1 day of dealing with that pretty much constantly, it stopped just as suddenly as it started, the last time it happened was late last Saturday night. For all I know, it's never coming back.

Don't ask me, I have no clue what it was, doctor's say my heart is beating very strong and perfectly timed, valves all seem ok, any problems should have shown up on the EKG or been heard in my heartbeat or breathing, or at worst seen in the blood tests. All that was clear, and I'm no longer being annoyed by the problem either (I was starting to worry I'd have to live with that for the rest of my life... which I could have, but it would have made me very grumpy :) ).

So, whatever, the body is weird... I'm just glad I don't now have to consciously think about beating my heart to make it go. :)