Today at work I had a couple of minutes where I genuinely believed I may faint or suffer some form of heart attack at my desk. It was amazingly surreal and terrifying all at once.
Over the past couple of days I've had a pain in my chest. It didn't seem like much. I self-diagnosed it as some kind of muscular pain rather than a specific heart condition. I mean, I'm a fairly fit and healthy man. I'm on the verge of 39-years-old but I can run 5-6 km in less than 30 minutes. I'm not obese. I have never smoked. And sure, I drink, more than I should, and probably I don't eat anywhere near as well as I ought to, but still - no one's perfect.
I've never, aside from one blip when I was a child that turned out to be nothing, spent a single night in hospital.
So I've got a pain in my chest that feels sharper when I breathe in, filling my lungs, and I figure that surely this is some form of muscular pain and it'll go away in a few days and that will be the end of it. I'm too fit and healthy for it to possibly be anything else, and that was the end of it.
Only that's not the end of it. And in the back of my mind, at the start of the week, there's this gnawing concern - only quiet, only subtle - saying that this doesn't feel quite right.
Yesterday, walking to the train station after work, and I arrive there sweating, slightly nauseous. I figure it's been a warm day but, because of the rain, I've had to wear a coat and so that has caused me to get hotter than comfortable. Never-the-less, when I get home my shirt and undershirt are more than just damp, they're wet and heavy.
I thought nothing of it. Later in the evening I had a quick blast on the exercise bike in the house. 10 minute burst, Did over 4k. I was sweating again, breathing hard, and there was no pain in my chest. Like you'd expect pain in your heart if you exercised hard if you were on the verge of a heart attack, right? I know I went on the bike for that quick blast like I was conducting a little test. I felt like I had passed it.
I was OK, I told myself. It's no biggie.
3 o clock in the morning I wake up in bed. My chest hurts. My sleepy brain cuts through the mild alarm to figure it's just something about the way I've been lying, my posture exacerbating the muscular problem I have diagnosed myself with. Only whilst I'm lying there, in my bed, my left arm is tingling.
If you've ever found yourself lying awake at 4 in the morning with worry you'll know that this is the time of day when your rational, comforting sense gives way to fears and concerns that flourish. I am lying in bed, next to my sleeping wife, genuinely worried I'm enduring some prologue to a heart attack. Thoughts about leaving my wife and my son behind, after my death, they play out.
4 o clock in the morning is an absolutely mental time of day to warp your worries into horrors.
I somehow pacify myself that I am being crazy. I know that being awake in the early hours of the morning forges these scary notions and I was resolutely not going to give in to them. I slept again. Woke up. Got ready. Went to work. And that brings us pretty much with me at my desk.
That mild pain in my chest and the slight dullness in my arm, it's still there. It's around 11 o clock in the morning, just before lunch, and sitting at my desk I casually look at Google on my phone and type in 'chest pain left arm numb'.
What I read scared the shit out of me. So many of the symptoms - like the nausea, sweating, the tingling and prickling sensations, the swelling pain across the front of the chest - all of that gets called out as seriously symptomatic of something. Words like 'pulmonary embolism' and 'aortic dissection' or just good old 'angina' jump out. The message is clear; don't wait, get to a doctor and get it checked. It might be nothing. It could be something.
And sitting at my desk my whole body just starts tingling, going numb. I'm not exaggerating anything. Honestly, it's not like me to give in to this. I've always considered myself stronger than that. Better. My wife, she's the hypochondriac, the stresshead. She's in and out of the hospital with all kinds of things. But not me. I'm the healthy one. But there I am going numb in my arms and legs, and my head is getting light.
Oh shit, I am thinking. I'm starting to panic that I am right there going to faint, for sure. I've never fainted. And right in that moment I believe it's absolutely going to happen. I'm surrendered to the certainty. I feel like I must have turned a whiter shade of pale, should anyone have cared to look at me and notice how stricken I had suddenly become.
Of course I didn't say anything to anyone. Bizarrely I was also worried about the sheer embarrassment and fuss that would be generated from collapsing at my desk. I couldn't bear the thought of it. I took deep breaths, tried to compose myself, and then after a minute I went to the bathroom and took off my shirt and splashed cold water on my face and paced and told myself over and over, Get a grip, you're not having a heart attack.
I calmed down. I was got annoyed with myself for being so weak.
Now here I am typing this. I made it home from work. The chest pain is still there, slightly more eased I think, and I am still telling myself that it's muscular. Has to be. And yet this also makes me think that if it's really just that then there, at my desk today, I suffered a panic attack. Me? Panic attacks? Come on!
But if it wasn't a panic attack then it was a real, mild warning signal of some issue with my heart that I can only hope to God isn't really there.
My plan is to see how it is tomorrow. If it feels like it's getting better, easing further, then great. I'll carry on keeping up with the exercise. Monitor myself, my feelings, and hey maybe I'll take a pass on drinking quite as much as I generally do.
And if this is the last entry of this blog, well, you can rest assured that that was absolutely a shitty idea and things did not go well and, really, the only advice I'd have to offer is: you ever find yourself feeling anything like I have described about today then don't be a fucking idiot like me; go and get yourself checked out.
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