palpitations

I dreamt last night, and remembered it for once. I think I’d moved house – at any rate, I was living in a different house from this, a more modern one, though to me ‘modern’ means any time from the 1970s onwards, I’m not used to anything more ‘modern’ than that. I don’t think I’d been living there very long, and I kept finding things in unexpected places – I know that’s not unusual with my memory, but among them were things I definitely didn’t recognise. The only explanation was that there was someone else in the house, or coming into the house, moving things around and leaving things that weren’t mine – I’m sorry this is very sketchy but my memory for dreams is never very clear. I was trying to explain to somebody – in person or on the phone, I can’t remember – about this sense of another person coming into my house, when I found a young blonde woman with a little girl was there with me, and she seemed to think it was her house, – she wasn’t the person I’d bought it from, but she clearly had a key. I tried to reason with her but she got angry. Then I thought I should call the police and get them to come while she was still there, but I couldn’t find my phone and while I was looking for it I woke up.

I lay in bed for quite a while and got up late. I felt overwhelmed with anger and despair, as I sometimes do in the mornings. I have got a lot of medical stuff to deal with over the next few weeks, I need to make appointments for blood and Covid tests, which I tried to ring up about yesterday (the GP and hospital respectively) but couldn’t get through. And I need to book my car in for its MOT, and started to think: the MOT is due by the 7^th, and I have to go to the hospital on the 17^th, and need a Covid test within 72 hours, so what if I book the test for the 15^th but then find the car fails the MOT, then I would have to take the van, but the drive through testing at the hospital is under cover, so would I be able to take the van? And will the van even start? I need to know this well in advance so I can tell the hospital I’ll need an alternative non-drive through test. All the what-ifs, what-ifs, what-ifs and all the phone calls I need to make to sort it all out hang around me like a lead collar, and this is why I get so angry with myself. I thought I would get better with this stuff as I got older, but I never do.

I know that everyone’s struggling at the moment, but I can’t help feeling as though everyone is now just getting a glimpse of what it feels like to be me.

A few weeks ago, on a Thursday evening, I started having heart palpitations. It only lasted a few minutes, but it felt so weird, and when it happened again I got quite worried. I spent a couple of days hoping it would just go away, and trying to decide what to do. The following Monday morning, I went on to my GP practice’s website to see if I could book an appointment – the new appointments come up on Monday morning, and you have to be quick to get one. I got a phone appointment for 9:40 this morning, and now I am wondering what I’m going to say when the doctor calls.

The palpitations are still happening, probably three or four times a day, for a few minutes each time, but I’ve got used to them. I’ve got a history of suddenly developing weird symptoms which then lead to investigations (sometimes quite nasty, invasive ones, like gastroscopy and colonoscopy) that don’t come up with any answers – except referrals for counselling and once, a prescription for amitriptyline, which made me feel like a zombie and was followed by two months of double vision which meant I could only see by closing one eye (no proof that there was a causal relationship, but it was enough to make me stop taking them after three weeks and swear never to touch them again).

The background to the palpitations is that in late 2019 I had a senior patient health check (or some words to that effect) at my GP surgery, which among other things tested my cholesterol and found it was quite high. So I was prescribed statins and went back after about six weeks – last January – for a check-up. I’d been noticing palpitations after I started the pills, and mentioned it, but all the tests were good, I had an ECG which was normal, and my cholesterol was down. The doctor wasn’t concerned about the palpitations but reduced the dose of the statins just in case and told me to come back for another check-up in three months.

Well, that didn’t happen of course. I kept taking the pills, the palpitations went away, the prescription was renewed every month. I tried to cut down my cholesterol intake (not going out for breakfast two or three times a week probably helped). But I didn’t have any way of checking any of this.

And then the palpitations came back. I couldn’t find any suggestion online that they might relate to Covid, but I’d had a recurring cough for a few weeks after Christmas, so I got a home test kit (which came back negative) and made this doctor’s appointment. I know she probably won’t be able to say much over the phone without repeating the tests I had last year. She’ll probably tell me – as my daughter did – that palpitations are often caused by stress and worry. At least I’ll be waving a flag and saying: ‘I’m still here, don’t forget about me!’

Category: palpitations