Blog Post 07: Broken Hearts Club
Let’s just say, this is not what I expected my next post to be about… this illness is something else! Just when you think you’ve nailed down your symptoms and made a treatment plan you feel confident with, something comes flying out of left field.
On Tuesday evening, I was trying to fall asleep, but my chest felt tight. I assumed lungs, as it’s always my lungs when my chest bothers me. I got up to go take my inhaler, but grabbed the pulse oximeter first to see what my oxygen saturation was. It was at 96%, which is lower than I would’ve liked, but nothing to be worried about. The cause for concern? My heart rate at 232 beats per minute. It fell into the 140s and lingered there for a while, before finally dropping to 80. I went back to bed feeling pretty nervous, but hopeful it was a fluke.
Yesterday I decided to work from home, just to be safe. I was doing fine in the morning, but come lunch time, my chest felt odd again. Check the pulse oximeter, heart rate at 217. It soon fell into the 120s, but then stayed there for about an hour. At this point, I decided I needed to be seen (read: I was being stubborn and my boyfriend insisted I go). In the ER, they ran a variety of tests- CBC, CMP, D-Dimer, Troponin, an EKG, and a chest X-ray. Everything checked out okay! While I was connected to the monitor, the highest my heart rate got was 160 beats per minute, so the doctor wasn’t able to truly see what I had seen at home. However, this warranted an urgent referral to cardiology for possible runs of supraventricular tachycardia (SVT).
Today, I met with the cardiologist. He is not my first cardiologist in my post-COVID journey, but he definitely has the harder job. In March of 2021, I had seen a cardiologist at Vanderbilt for an EKG and a cardiac ultrasound in order to be cleared to return to cheer. Everything looked great! However, in the year since then, my health has declined quite a bit. I’ve had a variety of inflammatory issues and my lungs have been struggling along, so it isn’t unreasonable that my heart could have suffered some damage along the way. This can even be seen in my resting heart rate, which has changed from the low 50s to the high 70s since my COVID diagnosis. The cardiologist said, “I could throw a hundred possible diagnoses at you, but until we get an EKG read of what your heart is actually doing when it’s beating that fast, I don’t actually know.”
Enter: CAM. CAM is a heart monitor that adheres to the chest and is worn 24 hours a day, from 2 to 14 days depending on the case. For me, it is 7 days. It constantly monitors your heart rate and serves as a full-time EKG. There is a small button at the top that you press when you feel symptomatic, plus a log to record the time and reason for the button press. For example, palpitations, shortness of breath, chest pain, etc. At the end of my week, I will mail the device to the manufacturing company so they can retrieve the information it collected and pass it on to my cardiologist. Between the week of wear, mailing time, data retrieval time, and time for my cardiologist to go through the results, I won’t follow up until the end of next month.
Tomorrow morning I’ll be heading to the outpatient infusion center! I’ll be receiving my first iron infusion and am hopeful that it’ll finally correct my anemia (and maybe lessen this fatigue). The progress has certainly not been linear as of late, but it’s progress nonetheless. As my cardiologist read my history, he told me that I am in “shockingly good spirits” despite the year I’ve had, so I’m trying to keep it that way.