Terrified my heart was going to pack in :(

[choccychompa]

Hi. I'm a 36-yr-old woman who has had missed hearbeats, etc for 5 1/2 years which have caused me to develop HA (mainly heart related.) Last night I was so nervous and psyched up at a situation that my heart started banging around in my chest, like it does sometimes, but there was also a pain as though my heart was about to pack in fromn the massive adrenaline rush. It happened to me once before when I was really nervous about three or four years ago and I'm still here, lol. But it was truly terrifying. Has anyone else had this reaction from massive amounts of stress? xxx

[blueangel]

Hi CC

I'm sure a lot of other people will pop up on this thread as well, as heart anxiety seems to be really, really common. I suppose it's fairly logical - it's the thing that keeps us going and we've only got one!

I do understand where you're coming from; I've had years of heart anxiety which originally started off from a random attack of severe paroxysmal tachycardia (or SVTs as they're often known), when I woke up early one morning with a pulse rate of about 200.

Not unsurprisingly, I thought I was having a heart attack and rang the doctor. The locum who turned up was dismissive and very unhelpful, and when I saw my own GP a couple of days later, he wasn't much use either. As a result of this, I rapidly developed a mistrust of medics and decided that there was something dreadfully wrong with me which they weren't telling me - and so the heart symptoms, which now included ectopics, palpitations, dizzy spells and all sorts of stuff, just got worse and worse.

I was prevented from becoming a complete basket case by a new GP who turned up at my health centre, and was able to explain to me what actually was wrong - in my case, not an awful lot other than the electrical impulses in my heart are a bit over-sensitive.

This improved things a lot, but I have had other bouts of anxiety about my heart from time to time, although so far never quite as severe as that first time. Work-related stress gave me particularly bad palpitations about 10 years ago, and I was duly given a Holter monitor to try out for a few days, but it never picked up anything abnormal.

So, I carry on and try not to get too steamed up about it, but i know how difficult that can be at times!

[janni]

I went to dentist first time in years and the adrenalin surged while sitting on the dentist chair had palpitations come and go since (theyre starting to calm down a little bit now) I have heart related anxiety too have irregular beats and pain caused by anxiety/Fibromyalgia its hard to say which causes which symptom. There is a great section on palpitations on the site just to the left under health worries always helps to reassure me with palipitations. Take care and hugs xx