That was a beautiful Spanish rice dish I tossed together with leftover cherry tomatoes cooked into the onion-pepper-garlic thing I sizzled down and added leftover stockpot chicken into, all stirred into a batch of jasmine rice and topped off with colby-jack. If you do anything like that, don't forget to dust cilantro, chili powder, and cumin into the veggies cooking.
My stomach setting off vagus nerve stimulated cardiac reactions got ridiculous enough to run in for testing, once again ruled out anything pancreas, aneurysm, infection, appendix, fluid pileup (ascites), kidneys, spleen, adrenals, no obstructions, nothing with gyno organs. Noted only remarkable thing is what they've always seen, that I'm fat, and they reaffirmed messenteric panniculitis, which is your basic benign fibrosing inflammatory disease. Since my entire body exhibits a fibrotic response to all kinds of healing, I've already dealt with double frozen shoulder and many other things, so they tend to brush that off with normal aging for me. But basically, even though I'm not a larger person, 'fat' is the notation here, although that doesn't typically set off vagus nerve stuff.
I've been running into stuff about CAID (Chronic atrial and intestinal dysrhythmia) that would certainly explain a lifetime of weirdness, although years of holter monitors have never confirmed sick sinus syndrome, but have confirmed correlation between digestive spasming and my heart feeling like it's trying to flip over, but docs have always called it PACs and PVCs and dismiss abdominal.
The problem over the last 6 months is that whatever is going on, it's been disturbing enough to wake me up with tachycardia out of sound sleeps. This used to happen regularly years ago and was so bad that I finally submitted to radio ablation for SVT, although back then I didn't experience hard skips during full out heart galloping, but now I do and it's pretty disturbing. I've been assured via full cardiac testing and sleep testing that I'm in excellent shape and all is well, but with my tummy suddenly turning into the Mars Rover tripping over boulders (stress can apparently flip that on like a switch), I'm actually getting mildly elevated troponin levels nowadays with my heart reacting to that.
So yeah, wanted to make sure everything was ok. I've been very ill with big problems in years past and it's kinda wise to just stay on top of a healthy baseline once in awhile.
The most immediate thing I could do was simply stop eating. That's not easy for a diabetic to do, especially when suddenly all electrolytes are being cut off, so after skipping a meal, the next 'meal' was a cup of beef broth and a half cup of milk, and so on. I got way less than 500 calories a day for 3 days because the heart reactions on top of feeling like part of my gut was being tasered (think spasms in one or two areas but I really didn't have much pain), and sometimes I'd feel shaky and even started launching into full blow panic attack responses out of the blue (out of a dead sleep or in the shower) every time my heart started skipping, and it took awhile to figure that out because I wasn't feeling the skipping in those situations. I discovered them accidentally with an oximeter showing bouncy beats, confirmed with feeling pulse, and then realized what I was feeling in my abdomen as big tugs was really my heart skipping. If I was laying in bed with this happening, I could turn onto either side and suddenly feel my heart doing that. I doubt I was in any danger at all, but feeling that kind of stuff is so disturbing that I couldn't go back to sleep. Over time I started developing shortness of breath when these things happened, and it took more time to nail down that was being caused by actual gut spasms, not my heart skipping.
So once I got that all figured out, I went in to ER and told them abdomen as opposed to mentioning heart, completely different set of testing that very quickly ruled out all the big bad things that can actually cause cardiac reactions as a symptom.
I still think this all goes back to being born addicted (pregnant mom on darvocet) and starting life on donnatal to prevent projectile vomiting as a newborn, and then experiencing a prodigious amount of intestinal awareness during childhood to the point of having a barium enema at less than 6 years old, years of throwing up at the drop of a hat, and many more years of very painful bowel spasming. I think it's a genetic glitch heightened by in vitro doctor approved medication abuse, and now as I'm aging, I have become extremely sensitive to all kinds of foods and stressors that seem to set off this stomach-cardiac combo enough to send me reeling into sporadic fasting every so often. I've spent years being checked for so much stuff, and if that is what it boils down to, genetics and medication abuse, imagine how the whole field of pharmaceuticals would change around this if things like this were acknowledged. But medicine is so compartmentalized that it has taken me nearly 60 years to even figure this out.
So, despite not being on a level playing field of normal nerve response, I'm still doing this to myself to some extent, and I've gotta straighten up again. My diet is already pretty strict by any standard, compared to most Americans, but this homemade ice cream binge I've been on can't be helping at all. It's too much dairy, too much sugar (even though I cut it way down), and extra calories, and even though I'm not lactose intolerant at all, the ice cream binge and the solid spastic bloat seem to be too coincidental to dismiss.
So that's where I'm at now, slowly adding food back after a few days of severely restricting food.
I got these pix last weekend while Scott and I were in a hardware store buying bags of chicken crumbles, mixed grains, and grit and picking up a new giant waterer to experiment with before we go on vacation later this summer. The chicken food we bought was expensive top of the line nutrition, then we walked through aisles like this and thought about all the ways people get sickly because this is the opposite of nutrition. It's weird and cute, but slugging just one of these bottles down all at once would put me in a hospital. Something to think about, guys.
Eat wisely.
No comments:
Post a Comment