For the past two weeks or more I had been having these pains and the only thing that helped was laying down. On Christmas night I was having severe chest pains and thought I was having a heart attack. So there was yet another trip to the ER for me during Christmas, but this time it was a good thing.
I had my parents (while it was snowing profusely) drive me to the ER in their Podunk little town. I'm not exaggerating the podunkness here of the town even a little bit. There's not one red light, just one tiny four way stop. If you blink, you've missed the town completely. The teensy tiny hospital has traveling doctors that visit it and I got lucky this night by getting someone who knew what he was talking about.
Over the past month I've had two EKG's done, one Echo Cardiogram done and seen lots of docs who were hesitant about doing anything. It turns out that the traveling doc knew what he was talking about and wasn't afraid to say it.
The chest pains were from an inflammation in the chest wall surrounding the ribs. Every time that I would cough, breath or have an irregular heart beat (more about that in a minute), it would hit that inflammation and be excrutiatingly painful. The cause? Remember the virus that turned into a sinus infection at Thanksgiving? That was the culprit. He put me on a methylprednisolone pak and some ibuprofen it's helping already.
Now, for the irregular heartbeat, he suspects mitral valve prolapse (which I evidently inherited from my Dad.) So that will be the next thing that I have looked at by my fancy docs.
Long story short, I'm feeling better (YEA!) and I am finally able to get up and move around somewhat. A good thing, cause the three males in the household have let things pile up into an ungodly mess. I've started chipping away at the Christmas toy mountain, Laundry mountain and the rest of the stuff that's been piling up on every flat surface. I'm afraid it's going to take a while to catch back up. :)
