More of the heart saga....

These past two and a half weeks have been a jumble of health issues. I've had weird, irregular heart palpitations for about a year and a half now. I saw my doctor when they first started, and she thought it was anxiety. So I was put on Valium. All that did was get me high and put me to sleep. So no more that. Then, they put me on a low dose of a blood pressure medicine. That didn't help either. Over the past year, the doctors have tried to diagnose exactly what is wrong with me. Unsuccessfully. Until now.

About a two weeks ago, I was diagnosed with Supraventricular Tachycardia. Basically, its an electrical problem in my heart. I was born with too much "wiring" that doesn't want to work right. All the extra "stuff" in there makes my resting pulse higher than it should be. And every now and then, the electrical impulses will cause the two atria (top two chambers of the heart) to contract and relax too rapidly. Which means they don't have time to fill with enough blood. Therefore, the two ventricles don't get enough blood to pump to the rest of my body. Which is why I get really light-headed and sometimes faint. It also causes a feeling of something really heavy being on my chest, so that I can't inhale deeply. Which makes me cough.

These random "sprints" that my heart decides to do aren't all that unhealthy, except for the fact that they will cause my heart to wear out more quickly. Especially since I am still so young. So we're going to start out with some different medications to try to control it. However, my doctor really wants to just go in and fix it. Which scares me to death. I have a ridiculously huge fear of surgery. But it sounds like some of the side effects from the medications would make surgery worth it.

And if all that wasn't enough, I'm having problems with my kidney and gallbladder. I started having severe pain in my right kidney, and they determined it to be gallstones. And they want to remove my gallbladder. Its still causing kidney pain, which raises my blood pressure, which makes my heart even worse. But they don't want to fix my gallbladder until they have my heart under control.

I'm glad to finally be figuring these things out, but at the same time, I'm tired of having doctor's appointments almost daily, having my arm pricked to draw blood, and I'm not looking forward to wearing this stupid heart monitor for the next month.