My wife's been complaining that I have an irregular heart beat and I've been getting palpitations of increasing frequency over the last week and a bit (some palpitations so violent that you can actually see my whole chest moving in time to my heart beat).
A visit to my doctor on Thursday had him concerned enough that I've had blood tests and an ECG (apparently my resting heart rate is a little slow) to get an idea of what my base heart beat and rate is like. It is not so much the heart itself that is the concern but the the associated symptoms that, until recently, I thought were completely unlinked:
- massive weight loss without any real change in diet - in the last year I've lost 10kgs and only put 2kgs back on - at 68kgs it's obvious I didn't have that spare weight to lose!
- extreme tiredness - I often battle to stay awake mid-morning and mid afternoon. Case in point - this morning I got up at 7:30 and was back in bed for an hour long nap at 9:45 (it's a public holiday). I got 8 hours sleep the night before.
While the Doc won't speculate ("it could be so many things, so these blood tests are just a fishing expedition"), my suspicion is over active thyroid which is easily treatable with medication. Absolute worst case (according to Google :> ) is my slow heart rate needs to be corrected with a pacemaker to make sure it fires regularly and at the right speed (my doctor didn't tell me this one, probably because it would be from a very rare condition and highly unlikely, but Diagnosis-by-Google is so much fun!).
Right now I'm not worried. If the blood tests come back without any answers, then I might start to think about it a bit more...
"iron-heart-stone-bench" originally uploaded to Flickr by A.M Griffin. Used under a Creative Commons license.
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