Minnesota has been hit with an epic heat wave. Every time I go outside I say “Fail Whale Weather.” As many of you know I suffered a pulmonary embolism in 2009. I have gone about a year without any pain or complications in my damaged lung. Over the weekend the old pain started creeping in.

It creeped up on me like a ninja in the night. At first Tylenol took care of it and so did sleep. Yet it hit me hard on Tuesday, so hard it almost knocked the breath out of me. I was at work when the pain started getting worse and had to leave.

This was the first time I had ever gone to Park Nicollet regarding chest pain. I went to Alina before and they had a drill that included EKG, Blood work, CT, and send AmandaJean home as it was nothing. This time things were different.

Different in a good way. The staff concentrated more on my heart than my lung. Blood work was taken and it came back negative for any new clots or clots at all. Since that was negative a CT scan wasn’t needed. Thank goodness for that, those things are not fun. Still it was a mystery. My heart was beating in a normal healthy rhythm of between 60 to 100 beats per minute and then it would race to 163 or as high as 192 beats per minute. An just like that it would go back into its normal range. I don’t feel sick, I just feel like someone is squeezing my heart and have some pain. It hurts when I breathe and it feels like my heart is trying to escape with its fast beats.

Since they don’t know the cause of this crazy heart behaviour all they could do was monitor me and log the fast beats. The DR scheduled a Stress Echo Test today. That is a whole ball of wax in its self. This will show them how hard my heart is working at rest and after stress is applied i.e. exercise or medication is injected. They compare the two videos to see if there are any differences in the heart. I will not get my results until tomorrow morning. So right now I am trying my hardest to be a patient ninja. Patience is not my virtue.

Something tells me that Alina may have missed the big picture. They were always so focused on another clot and on my lung its self. I think they often forgot that hey the original and only clot blocked the blood flow to my heart. Durring that whole time my heart was in sinus tack which is an irregular heart beat. Just like it is now. This is something that’s probably be going on since 2009. Then again heart disease does run in my family. Either way for the first time I actually feel confident that I am going to get the answers I’ve been waiting for.

For me this is just another side effect of that farking birth control I used. Part of me wonders what would my life be like if I never used it. Then on the same coin, that experience has given me more strength than I could have ever dreamed of. Every thing happens for a reason and everything has a reason for happening.