New palpitations, feeling very scared, drs being unsympathetic and unhelpful?

Earlier this week I had chest pain and went to A and E. They did an ekg and said it was fine, but refused to do bloods, I wasn’t feeling very reassured but I’ve had benign chest pain before so I hoped for the best.

The next day, I had a scary palpitation episode where my heart fluttered for about 10 seconds straight. I’ve never experienced this before, and the fact it happened the day after having chest pain really scared me.

My heart rate has been high since and I feel breathless. Been to a and e twice so far and both times they just did an ecg and told me they were not doing bloods as I had labs done in October and they felt no need to test me. Understandable I guess but that doesn’t help me at all.

The dr at the latest a and e was pretty cheeky and basically implied I was making this up for attention and that it was the same stuff I have been in with before. I repeatedly explained to him that this was new onset symptoms and I’m really worried about ventricular tachycardia (it felt like this, and was started with a PVC) but he didn’t care and kept saying go back to your GP and get referred to a specialist - which will take weeks if not months. Meanwhile I am sitting here terrified of feeling those palpitations again and not knowing if there actually is structural damage to my heart because I need the blood test to know. I’ve even considered booking a troponin test privately but I would have to travel to another city and it’s very expensive, and would take another week for results.

I’m so tired, I understand they think nothing is wrong and don’t think it’s worth investigating, but the fact I’m having these new scary flutters that last 10 seconds, the day after having chest pain, is too coincidental to ignore. My GP surgery doesn’t even have an ecg machine or blood tests ffs, they can’t do anything for emergency medicine, I feel totally helpless and let down.

If the A&E doctors don't think there is a need for bloods you'll just have to trust them. If there was any clinical need indicated they would have done it.

Your increased heart rate and breathlessness could be related to how anxious you are feeling. What techniques do you use to help with your HA?

A blood test is not going to tell you if you have any structural damage to your heart. They can tell someone is in the process of having a heart attack by running a Troponin test but the protein doesn’t stay in your blood indefinitely and therefore it is not a test that’s used to look for heart damage. They gave you an EKG which takes a picture of your hearts electrical system. This can tell them if your having any arrhythmia (if it’s happening while you’re hooked up to the machine), it can tell them if your electrolytes are out of whack enough to cause rhythm disturbances, it can sometimes see an old heart attack and many other things so it’s a good test to have. Emergency room doctors are fairly good at determining if ones chest pains are cardiac in nature and so in their medical opinion (which carries a lot of weight) your chest pain was being caused by something outside of the heart. The emergency room isn’t likely to admit someone to perform a cardiac work up if they feel the persons symptoms are not cardiac related. The same goes for palpitations, if you go in with palpitations they will run and EKG, if the EKG is clear it either means your symptoms are not heart related or you weren’t having any arrhythmia at the moment they ran the EKG and so they will tell you to follow up with a cardiologist. If your concerned about your palpitations you should follow up with a cardiologist. They can put you on an event monitor which is worn over a period of time anywhere from 24 hours to 30 days. This will tell them what your heart rhythm is at the moment your feeling palpitations. It’s not likely that your experiencing runs of ventricular tachycardia so I wouldn’t worry about that.

Anxiety can cause palpitations and it can also cause you to feel short of breath. If your having something like ectopics (which are benign) anxiety will increase those as well.

I can see why you feel the doctors were fobbing you off as you have a documented history of similar anxiety related visits. But they followed proper protocol and checked you out and as before, there was nothing physically wrong. Might be time to treat the real problem :shades:

FMP