The First and the Worst

So the morning of my first day of classes started out positively with me sleeping through a date and all four times the poor guy called me.

When I got up and went to class, my heart was racing even after I got there, and I was all sweaty. I almost never sweat, so that was notably strange. Then I noticed I had a pain in the center of my chest. Not a bad one, just an odd pain I'd never had before. After sitting in class for about 20 minutes, I used the timer on my phone to check my pulse. My heart rate was 140 bpm, twice the normal rate for adults at rest. I mostly shrugged it off - my heart races fairly frequently, anyway - and went on with my day. The pain went away in about 15 or 20 minutes. I had a soda after class and felt better.

I went to my second class and when I left, I had the singular joy of hiking up the hill back to my apartment. I had to stop multiple times on the way up because I felt so awful. Not only did my heart race like crazy, but I was getting short of breath and faint. I started to feel a weird tingling numbness in my right arm and on the right side of my middle back. The pain in my chest came back.

I eventually made it to my apartment and crashed - literally. I collapsed on the floor panting, trying to catch my breath. I felt like I was covered in a weighted blanket, it was so hard to move. Eventually I grabbed a thermometer from my desk and took my temperature because I felt really hot. My temperature was 94.5. Then I checked my pulse and it was 164 bpm. When I felt well enough and the chest pain had faded, I got up and ate dinner then called my mom.

Mom was concerned but more confused. She didn't really have an opinion on whether I should see a doctor. I decided to go to the ER at St. Agnes Hospital, where I went back in February for my alleged kidney stone. They were kind of alarmed. The PA asked me, "What took you so long to get here?"

They drew blood and did an EKG, then a chest x-ray. I was settled into a room in the chest pain ward of the ER to wait for the results. Then they drew more blood and ran more tests.

Everything came back normal and my heart rate had settled down, so they sent me home and told me to see my primary care physician for a follow-up. If it gets worse, I should go back. The doctor said it's weird for someone my age and weight to have such a high resting heart rate (even when I left, it was about 95 after lying down for two hours), but that they didn't detect anything out of the ordinary.

I really REALLY hope that this goes away or gets better or something, because I can't finish every day thinking, "Maybe I should go to the hospital." I'd never have time to get any work done.

To finish on an upbeat note, at least I am now 100% certain that I'm not pregnant. As opposed to the 99.99% certainty I had before.