Diagnosing myself

I started having these irregular heartbeats back in January. When they first started happening I thought oh well, palpitations again. They come and go. Well, this time they didn't go! They stayed 24/7 and were more than the usual racing beat or extra beat or skipped beat. It was near constant.

I went to see my regular doctor and she said I had high blood pressure because every time I go in my bp reads high...never mind that every time I go in I am either in pain or sick and that can elevate bp. No, she says I need medicine or I could have a stroke or something. SO, I took the Inderal she prescribed. That's when the irregular heartbeats became a regular thing.

Went off to the cardiologist. He put me on a different beta blocker which didn't do anything except turn me into a zombie. I was butt-draggin' tired all the time. And my pulse was 45! So, he tried adjusting the dosage. All that did was make me a little less sleepy, but the irregular heartbeat never normalized.

Then I saw a gastro doctor and a lung doctor in between. The lung guy found I have a nodule in my right lung that I have to have rescanned in August. Probably a rheumatoid nodule from the RA but he wants to be sure. Then went to a gastro doc who did an endoscopy that would tell if I had ulcers again. Had that done on the 9th of this month and sure enough...ulcers are back and gastritis. He put me on ulcer meds and one of them didn't agree with me...made my throat and food pipe burn...why? The dumbasses never told me I had to DISSOLVE the tablet in water and drink it! It was getting stuck and all the medicine staying in my esophagus!

In the meantime the cardiologist told me to stop the BP med and let things get out of my system before starting another drug. I did that and the heartbeat was still constantly irregular. SO I did some research on my own about GERD, (I also have a hiatus hernia) and heart irregularities and guess what? There IS a connection. So I called the gastro guy again and asked him and he says that he often has patients end up in ER for cardiac symptoms that are triggered by the ulcers and gastritis. There is a nerve that runs from your brain, through your neck and down to the espohagus, heart and other organs. When irritated it can cause heart irregularities. So, he gave me some different medicine and said to stay on a bland diet and guess what? I am happy to report that the irregular heartbeat seems to be settling back to some sort of normalcy...thank goodness.

Sometimes we just have to do the detective work ourselves.

Facebookin'

I've been doing too much Facebooking lately and not paying enough attention to my blogs. Well, I am going to try to be better about that from now on. I have missed writing out full sentences and participating in some intelligent debate.

Facebook is fun, don't get me wrong. I do enjoy keeping tabs on what everyone is doing. It's been great for staying connected. It's also been the source of drama and I have had to witness some of these dramas via my newsfeed wall that I would have been better off not knowing about. What some people write on their Facebook walls boggles the mind. I've witnessed a whole relationship of one couple break up, fall apart, the nasty exchanges, and then the whole mob action against the guy for being a cheater...and then finally, like in the movies...the whole barfy reconciliation.

The games on Facebook are big time wasters. I really do enjoy Yoville, but hate the farms. This is a strange phenomenon. I hate the farms but feel compelled to click, click, click away to "harvest the fruits, vegetables and other things from cartoon fields, trees and animals. Then like I wrote about before, the cartoon cafe where I spend time preparing cartoon dishes for cartoon characters to eat. I recently started working again online so have to curtail these activities and hopefully this will wean me off of my current FB addiction before it sucks me in even farther.