I am having an issue that is really starting to affect my MENTAL health. For about 3 years now I have episodes while I am lying in bed. It only happens when I lay flat or almost flat. I now have to sleep sitting upright to keep it from happening.
When I lay flat I get a feeling like my whole body is vibrating very fast. My heart beat is pounding and it feels like someone is standing on my chest. If I stay laying down my heart hurts. It goes away often within minutes of me sitting back up but sometimes it lasts for 5-15 minutes. Sometimes if I let it go for too long my heart hurts on into the next day.I have gone to a cardiologists, a gastro-intestinal physician and an internal medicine doctor. They have all said I was in excellent health for a now 50-year old.I just can not go on like this.
It does not happen every night. I even have several nights in a row where I can sleep an entire night without a single episode. I have had to go to the hospital in the past after waking up to this strange thing happening only to be told they could see nothing. I wore a heart monitor and it also found nothing.I just want to know what is going on. It is so bad sometimes that I can not get back to sleep for several days in a row and have to rely on sleep aides to help.It is real and is not a figment of my imagination. It even happens when I relax back in my recliner at times.
When I get up to shake off the symptoms, my whole body is vibrating and my blood pressure feels like it is going to just blow my heart right up. It really scares the hell right out of me that no doctor can tell me what in the world is going on.I was told that I had two partially blocked arteries and a "leaky" valve but I pass my heart diagnostics with flying colors. I am disabled but still fairly active and healthy except for this. I can walk several miles at a time without getting winded at all. This just baffles me.
I just knew when I had all my work-ups that the doctors would find an elephant in my chest but they all said the same thing...nothing we can see...you must be fine then. I tell you that my heart hurts so bad sometimes during these attacks that it is just amazing my heart shows no damage.ANY help would be appreciated.Norm
I have similar problems but I'm in my middle 30's. I have read many of these kinds of sites searching for answers as well. Since I work as a technician on computers I have gained a pretty good sense of gathering info to troubleshoot problems. The human body obviously is obviously way more complicated then computers and I'm no doctor. I have gone to doctors which like most people don't really ever find anything to greatly wrong. I do have Mitral valve prolapse, but have been told it is a very minor one. I also suffer from bouts of gastric reflux due to my hiatal hernia. In my late teens, early twenties I had panic attacks that lasted for a couple years. Up until this point I really hadn't had any issues like this with my heart. These attacks don't feel like the panic attacks I use to have. They are more subdued, the palpitations don't always turn into a full on anxiety event, but they do keep me up afterward. I found what most all of the people here are complaining about has a name and can be found here http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/001100.htm . However it is just a general term and does not give rise to any permanent solution.
From all that I have read though the answers are going to vary for every person of course but I think they all have one key element other then the effect of the heart going crazy and that is hormones. There are a lot of teens I've seen on this site at least that are complaining about these like same type problems. Obviously if kids were falling over dead as much as they are commenting I think we would have heard about it by now. The thing older people have with teens though would be hormones. We go through several major changes eventually through out our lives and during those times some people experience abnormal hormone production. Maybe to much, maybe to little. The huge problem with medical care unlike computers or any other machines in the world is that you as an individual are told you are to stupid to understand or read or decipher testing equipment meant to diagnose the human bodies fluids, structural, or electrical components. So all the testing equipment is kept from us behind the so called enlightened gods we call doctors. Which from the last time I checked bled like the rest of us and don't live forever. That being said there will be no way for me to prove my theories, but feel free to think on them if you wish.
Some more ideas about hormones. For me at least the problems come on after I have laid down for sleep at night and have been asleep for about 20 to 30 minutes. Then all of a sudden I wake up to feel my heartbeat going crazy. Sometimes some of my body parts will go numb. Hands, arms, fingers will tingle, all most all of the time there is a strong urge to fight what I can only describe as a type of confusion. Obviously waking up in this manner is rather confusing to begin with but the thoughts in my head aren't always that there is something wrong. It happens to enough for me to recognize that its just another bout and so I try to stay focused to observe patterns or anything that might help someone figure out a way to diagnose it. Something interesting to note is that the human body releases hormones when you sleep to do well maintenance on things. From some shows I've seen and some sites I've read they say it occurs late at night around 1am or so. Now to me that seems a little precise so I figure it's probably more when a persons normal cycle for them is during the day and they go to sleep. However cause your mind has a stupid ability to mentally corrupt your physical well being I'm sure my mind could be stressing my body now at the times I have these attacks considering I normally don't get to sleep till around 1am.
So inclusion to this very short version of a long journey of episodes and with little ability to truly gather the important data of things from my body such as the hormone levels before the events and then after or even which hormones might be responsible for this type of problem, I will give some suggestions which are rather over all general (of courses) for the most part. I do find that my sweet spot to avoiding my episodes seem to come from getting to bed before 1130 or so. Anything after that I can find myself as I do right now staying up till 4am. Other things to try as many sights suggest. Stay away from caffeine, chocolate, do moderate exercises (they don't have to be vigorous just more like an activity) Things like moving your arms in a circle motion forward and then backward kind of thing. Jog in place while doing this if you can. I normally use 2 pound dumb bells and kind of swing my arms around with them and all. Nothing to crazy though, it does make my heart work a little so I figure that's better then nothing. I'm sure doing a series of normal exercises in a gym or something couldn't hurt but ya I'm lazy. So keep hydrated, there is a connection with water and electrolytes. Potassium, sugar and sodium levels all are affected by how much water you drink that could displace these elements. Without proper electrolytes your heart can run like a poorly tuned car engine. In the case of a car it doesn't kill it to be out of tune but over time can cause more wear and tear on the parts.
(Rant) We are a huge factory of chemicals and without being able to observe their levels much as you would check transmission fluid ,oil, break or power steering in your car you don't know what your missing or what you might have to much of. I don't know if there is any certain code you could use to demand your doctor do batteries of tests on the chemical levels in your body to try to find abnormalities. Besides how would any average person have that much knowledge of what to even look for unless they were a bio chemist themselves. One could just observe levels when feeling fine and then observe the levels when having problems. This isn't always a correct means test though for chemicals in the body. Also, since so many doctors can't ever seem to agree to much on any standard of anything, how would you even know if that was exceptable or not. I think this is probably for a couple reasons. One most doctors aren't able to add all the areas together as well as they should and two it gives the medical community another reason to keep you coming back for more non answers. I have worked with a lot of "technicians" in my line of work. There aren't a lot of them that really care a great deal about everything. They try to focus on a simple fix and like most teenagers with the attention span of a nat. If it can't be fixed with in a few times of looking at it, the solution always seems to come just replace something. In that I'm comparing how our science of the human body has primarily focused on how to replace our parts rather than figuring out how to keep them from getting damaged in the first place.
(Hope, every bit helps) It has only been in the last 15 years or so that we are digging ever that far to understand that complexity. Genetic fixes and DNA building or rebuilding in our cases. Oh I also wanted to mention at least as a therapeutic remedy for the palpitations at night a least try sitting in your room with out any lights but the one coming from a computer monitor or tv. Make it as bright as you can stand and try to get it on a white page. Light therapy is a treatment used to help people that have problems falling asleep at night. Kind of the same effect as driving at night with some guy blaring his high beams at you. It triggers something in the body to want to sleep, thus why most of us get tired when driving at night. I feel like I've left a ton of things out that still could be helpful, but like i said before the human body is way to complex to be summed up on a short forum read. Hope this info might help someone. Maybe it will at least lead to someone figuring out some more simple testing devices for things like vitamin levels and such for home usage. I mean come on give us something here other then blood pressure, sugar level and cholesterol level testers. How is it I have a ton of ways to test any other machine I own but I can count all the ways i have to test the most important machine I'll ever own my human body. Can someone put this on a ballet. I'd rather vote on that than some of these political knuckleheads. Hope this helps some of you out there. Good luck.