LittleWyvern.com

Honestly, there is so much going on in my life right now that is blog-worthy that I am up to and then beyond the point of being overwhelmed. It is somewhere between difficult and impossible to explain any one of these things without also discussing in elaborate detail all of the others. Unfortunately, for various reasons I either can’t or won’t be able to do that. So where then to begin…

Let’s just deal with what is happening specifically to me – specifically right now.

My world at the moment is in a state of complete upheaval. It seems to be the only certainty of life that no matter how complicated or overwhelming our journey towards death may get… there is always room for it to get a little bit worse. And as the famously anonymous Mr. Murphy will tell us: because it can, it usually will.

There are a solid four or five as-yet-unwritten journal posts that I would like to be able to reference at this point, but since I can’t (yet) I am going to give you the very condensed Cliff’s notes that will bring you to an ill-informed but hopefully semi-competent understanding of my present situation.

Here is what has been going on lately:

1. I am trying to form my own business and build something completely on my own. My enthusiasm is high, but so too are the hurdles before me. I can’t elaborate at the moment.

2. My brother is moving to Las Vegas in ten days. My family is in the process of finding and buying a house for us both to live in. This too has complications, but it’s generally pretty low on my list of concerns.

3. I spent ten days last month up in Michigan both passively watching and actively helping my grandfather die. My uncle and I were alone in the room with him when it happened and we watched as his breathing got shallower and shallower until it finally stopped altogether. Soon after, I briefly helped the nurse wash the dead body that had been my living grandpa only an hour before. His was not the first dead body I have seen, but it was the first that I have touched. Of course he was the first person that I have actively watched die, standing less than a foot away counting the seconds between his breaths until no more came. A few days later I helped carry his coffin at both the funeral and the cemetery. It was the second coffin that I had carried in less than one year. Overall, that week has easily become the most personally profound of my entire life. I owe my grandfather, and this experience, a much longer and more detailed entry, but I am having trouble finding the words to express it. It is on the way, though. I promise.

4. I came back to Vegas after the funeral, but only days after arriving I learned that one of my friends from college – a person who is very close to someone who is very close to me (I am not going to go into details on this one out of consideration for the privacy of everyone involved) – had an extremely large tumor growing inside her chest. There were complications during the biopsy and now she is in the ICU fighting just to stay alive. Even if/when she manages to survive the immediate danger she will still have to battle the cancer. I can’t go into any further detail.

5. Finally, a situation took place two weeks ago involving a girl. More accurately a situation took place two weeks ago involving me… and a girl happened to be there. I learned a staggering amount about myself in a matter of only a few hours, but because my track record with girls is not so great there is a decent-to-good chance that the girl in question will find her way to this website. I don’t need to deal with that kind of drama. Still, I might eventually put up a post about it anyways.

Ok… so the point of all the above is to say that I have recently found myself thrust into the raging vortex of an emotional tornado of doom. Still, I am largely impervious to these sorts of things. My emotional core is coated in a thick shell of triple-strength Teflon to the point where any one or two of these things would likely glance off my psyche without any lasting effect. (For instance, and perhaps not proudly, on the day of my grandfather’s visitation I called Microsoft Support from the funeral home and had them fix my roommate’s Xbox.) Unfortunately, when the current realities of life came upon me in mass, I unexpectedly found myself overcome. The manifestation has proven diabolical.

If it were just a matter of crying it out for a few hours… fine. A bout of hyperventilation? A temporary mental breakdown that has me streaking through a random casino? All fine.

Instead, the night immediately after Number 5 above (the Girl Incident), I was laying in bed and suddenly realized that it was very difficult to breathe. It felt as though someone was sitting on my chest, or that the air itself had become twice as viscous. Each breath took conscious effort, and whenever I didn’t intentionally will myself to breathe… I wouldn’t. Instead, I would gasp for air and my heart would flutter. I could feel my heart literally skip a beat and slam up against the inside of my ribcage. This routine carried on for quite some time: perhaps ten deliberate breaths followed by an involuntary gasp and a heart spasm. I did my best to use the power of my brain to will my heart and lungs back to normal, but seemingly to no avail (mind over body, my ass). The exertion of trying to keep myself alive (as I felt it) proved exhausting, though, and eventually I fell asleep.

During the following day I was fine. It was as if nothing had happened. And yet, that night the problems all came back. I couldn’t breathe. My heart was beating irregularly and once again the effort of it all wore me out until I fell asleep. The next day when I woke up, though… things were not better. They were worse. Every breath was a chore. I could feel my heart beating into my chest and the rhythm did not seem normal. I considered going to a hospital ER, but having been warned against it by various media (ERs becoming the new doctor’s offices, etc) I called a doctor instead. The earliest they could get me in would be the following Wednesday. I decided to set up the appointment and in the meantime try to deal with the situation myself. That worked for about five minutes before the pain in my chest was enough to convince me that I may legitimately be dying. And if I actually let myself die from some kind of heart failure simply because I was too much of an idiot to not go to a hospital… well I would be really mad at myself.

There is an urgent care center near my apartment and I figured that would somehow be better than going to a hospital ER. I drove myself the one mile to the center, but while I was stuck at the red light which turned into the building’s parking lot I gave honest consideration to the idea of simply abandoning my car at the light and running the hundred yards to the facility. The strain of trying to breathe was worsening and again I thought how ridiculously ironic/embarrassing it would be to die in my car 100 yards from the doctor’s office. It would be like driving from Las Vegas to Chicago only to get a speeding ticket within the last mile of your trip. You know… except that instead of getting a ticket I would be dead.

At the center the doctors ran a whole battery of tests including one that involved hooking me up to an air compressor to try to open up my lungs. In the end, aside from a slightly low blood oxygen content everything came up normal. I actually expected as much, but was relieved just the same. The doctor diagnosed the problem as being simple anxiety and prescribed Xanax to be taken whenever I started to feel panicked. I felt embarrassed to have wasted the doctors’ time and apologized at least twice before leaving. I do find it somewhat beautiful though that merely being given a diagnosis of ‘anxiety’ is enough to actually relieve me of much of my anxiety. The stress in my life continues, and therefore so too both the anxiety and the panic attacks it spawns – breathing issues and heart irregularities – but the Xanax seems to have helped a bit.

That was last week. Let’s fast forward to today…

Despite being event-free for several days, last night I woke up around 4am in the middle of an episode. I tried to deal with it myself, but that didn’t work and so I stumbled my way to the prescription bottle and downed a pill. The episode didn’t abate, but eventually I fell asleep anyways. My doctor’s appointment had been scheduled for this afternoon (the visit that I had reluctantly scheduled while seeking immediate treatment the week before). I went into the office and had a physical. As part of the service the nurse hooked me up to an EKG machine complete with various sticky electrodes all over my legs, chest, and arms. When the doctor came in he showed me the EKG’s printout and explained that it had come back abnormal. The test did not show any of the heart fluttering that I have been experiencing (I had taken a Xanax about ten hours before the test… during that night’s episode), but it showed something else that he thought might be cause for some concern.

Here is a normal ECG wave (courtesy of Wikipedia):

A standard EKG readout will be a series of those waves – I am sure you are all familiar with it on at least a basic level. My readout was a bit different though. Specifically, there was an abnormality in my T-wave: the little hump at the end of the wave. Instead of being a consistent little hump like is shown in the picture, on about every third heartbeat my T-wave would be inverted. Instead of rising to a peak it would dip and form a valley. The valleys were intermittent – some beats were normal, others were inverted. The EKG machine made a general and non-specific diagnosis that basically equated to “something is wrong, but I am just a machine and have no idea what is going on.” My doctor made a casual, almost too nonchalant guess that “something is wrong with the front of your heart.”

The doctor sent me down the hall and had me take a chest x-ray. From what I hear the x-ray came back relatively normal (though the doctor did not seem terribly enthusiastic or convincing in his reassurances). In order to make a more definitive diagnosis I will require more extensive testing. To that end I am scheduled for a blood panel in about one week and a treadmill test (a “stress test”) in two weeks. The delay is for insurance purposes (I need approval from my insurance company for the tests before I can take them), so hopefully nothing gets worse in the meantime.

I will be honest with you all, this situation is just a little bit scary. Even if it is nothing – merely another symptom of my anxiety – this series of events is only making it worse. Being told, “oh, it’s just anxiety” will naturally ease the anxiety. However, being told, “we have no idea what’s going on at the moment, but your heart may be in serious trouble” can go a long way to making the anxiety worse.

Attempts at self-diagnosis are equally paranoia-inducing. Wikipedia says this:

Inverted (or negative) T waves can be a sign of coronary ischemia, Wellens’ syndrome, left ventricular hypertrophy, or CNS disorder.

After following the link to coronary ischemia I quickly came across this little nugget of optimism:

It [coronary ischemia] is the most common cause of death in most Western countries…

From there I naturally found my way onto the page for heart failure. To my dismay I find that the symptoms of left sided heart failure are:

The most common symptoms are respiratory in nature. Failure of the left ventricle causes congestion of the pulmonary capillaries. The patient will have dyspnea (shortness of breath) on exertion (dyspnée d’effort) and in severe cases, dyspnea at rest. Easy fatigueability and exercise intolerance are also common complaints. Increasing breathlessness on reclining, called orthopnea, occurs. It is often measured in the number of pillows required to lie comfortably, and in severe cases, the patient may resort to sleeping while sitting up. Another symptoms of heart failure is paroxysmal nocturnal dyspnea, a sudden nighttime attack of severe breathlessness, usually several hours after going to sleep.

Awesome… that is pretty much exactly what I am experiencing. During my “episodes” at night I would prop myself up with pillows to help make it easier to breathe. Oh, and that sudden nighttime attack that takes place several hours after going to sleep… yeah, that happened to me last night.

Ugh. I don’t put much credence into self-diagnosis, and very likely this is a good example of how access to information can be more harmful than not, but still…

If I had it my way I would have my stress test tomorrow, but our health care system currently makes that unrealistic/impossible. If there were no other reason for me to vote for Obama in November, this alone would do it.