Heart attack or anxiety attack? Hard to tell.
So yesterday I was watching a basketball game and enjoying myself and then I felt a bit of tightness around the collarbone area. I have my anxiety to thank for taking things over from there. Once I felt this tightness and after panicking for about an hour I got myself to the ER. I think it's fair to say that I have significant health anxiety. That being said I don't know where it comes from. I've been fine with my health and keeping myself calm concerning my health all the way up until this past year. I can't think of anything that would trigger such a change, but I digress. The point is I felt some tightness and went to the ER to get it checked out. My first 30 minutes there I was hopeful I'd be out within the hour with no complications of any kind. I got my EKG and everything looked fine. They did a chest x-ray and everything looked fine. They even kept me for a while to keep an eye on it to make sure they didn't miss anything. For some reason this didn't calm me down and I seemed to still be panicking and they ended up putting a nitroglycerin patch on my chest just to be safe. I had about 3 EKG's the entire time there and I left the ER around 6am. At one point I experienced nausea while I was there but eating a bit of food and drinking some ginger ale seemed to help a bit. The doctor did one final EKG and listened to my chest and decided it was time for me to leave. On the way home I ate some crackers and drank some orange juice. When I got home I got sick within about 10 minutes. Obviously this upset me because I don't know why I was experiencing this. On a side note, my mother did have a stomach bug a little bit ago(6-7 days ago) and she ended up getting sick and wasn't okay for about 48 hours. She doesn't entirely understand my anxiety (and nor do I for that matter) so she thinks it's just a stomach bug that she must have passed to me. They checked me out multiple times at the ER and I have none of the typical Heart Attack symptoms like arm numbness or neck/jaw pain. I just had a bit of tightness around my collarbone area and some nausea. Like I said they ran the EKG multiple times and came back with nothing to be concerned about and released me so obviously they did their research and felt that it was safe for me to go home. I'm just curious as to what could have made me get sick? Could it have been the side effects of the nitroglycerin? Could it just be that I have some muscle tightness as well as a stomach virus and they just happen to be at the same time as one another. I've been trying SO hard to get over this stupid health anxiety I've had this past year and I had a pretty good 5-6 month stretch of feeling great with no worries and now this past month has been a bit of a set back. First I thought it was a blood clot and now I think it's my heart. Anyone else having problems like this? It'd be nice to know I'm not the only one. Thanks in advance for even taking time to read this. I hope you are all having a wonderful day :)
