At around 04:20, on the morning of Monday 9th of September 2024, I got woken up by "burning pressure pain" in my chest.
At first, I thought it was more or less the same thing that happens to me sometimes when I feel a numb rumbling of a nausea-like sensation in my chest after lying in a certain position or when I get bored. I sat up in my bed and waited for it to go away, because that's how the nausea-like sensation goes away. I waited for about 5 minutes and it only got worse.
I was feeling some unusual disturbance around my heart as well, and maybe a few "bleeps" of pain every now and again. I could feel weird sensations radiating away from my heart and towards the centre of my chest, which was where the pain was starting to peak and heat.
In the centre of my chest, around where my oesophagus is, I was feeling pain alongside sensations of burning and pressure. It felt as if there was (hot) gas or liquid in or around my oesophagus and, to a lesser extent, my heart. It felt as if it was so pressured that it was expanding something inside my chest, and that expansion was causing the burning and the pain. Whether that's what was happening, I do not know. I'm just describing the sensation the best I can.
Besides pressure in and around the oesophagus, there was a second type of pressure that felt more wide-spread. As opposed to the oesophagus burning pressure, this second type of pressure felt like my whole chest and neck were being compressed or constricted. It just felt like, inside my body, there was less space for air to go through and to. Although it wasn't as strong as the first time of pressure, it did make it somewhat harder to breathe.
5 minutes later, I stepped out of my bed and slowly walked to the bathroom to check how I'd feel on my feet, and to look at the mirror to see what my face is showing. My walking, balance, and face were fine. However, after I checked on my face, I suddenly started feeling as if my consciousness was gradually slipping away.
I was feeling like I was very slowly entering a tunnel of darkness. I started hearing tinnitus-esque noises in my ears - white noise on top of a whistling-bleeping-ringing-squeaking sound. At the same time, my hearing was also becoming muffled. Both of these effects were approaching my from the back and slowly overtaking me, creating a narrowing effect.
My vision was doing a similar thing — it got grainy and started darkening around the periphery, slowly narrowing.
All of these audible and visual symptoms I've experienced in the past, just before fainting. So, that's why I was assuming I was going to faint.
I stumbled back to my bedroom and sat down on the edge of the bed. The pre-fainting symptoms slowly went away. The chest and oesophagus "burning pressure pain" was still there.
I wasn't sure what I was experiencing or what to do, so I called 111 (UK non-emergency number for medical advice and near-emergency stuff). They asked a bunch of generic questions about various symptoms. I told them what I'd written here. They decided that was serious enough for an ambulance, and dispatched one for me. They also told me to take 100mg of Aspirin in tablet form.
As I sat around waiting for the ambulance, the burning pressure pain kept slowly fading, but never fully going away. My heart kept feeling weird.
The ambulance crew arrived, I told them everything. I had my blood pressure measured and an ECG done. The ECG was normal, but my BP was 175/105. The crew strongly advised me to go with them to the A&E. At the time, I was feeling rather sociophobic and my hair was unwashed, which added to the anxiety. I was worried that the A&E waiting room was going to be full of people, which would've made me feel pretty anxious. Thus, I refused to go.
They did advise me to see a GP ASAP, which I agreed with.
After they left, I was feeling the same way I was just before they came i.e. slight burning pressure pain and moderate weirdness in my heart. I went to bed and tried to get some sleep before getting up again to book a GP appointment.
It was a phone appointment, though, which is not ideal.
The GP was an okay one. Not my preferred one, but not one of the ones I can't stand either. However, the exchange we had made me dislike him more. He mainly just thought it was acid reflux, and that I panicked so much to acid reflux that I almost fainted.
Pal, do you even know me? Clearly not. Clearly you don't care to know me or what is actually wrong with me. The guy just saw "generalised anxiety disorder" in my list of diagnoses and wrote it all down to that. How about you look at my ADHD referral and how I've said that one of my symptoms of ADHD is self-neglect?
I'm most definitely not someone who has panic attacks in response to fucking ACID REFLUX. Bitch, my mouth has been rotting for years, I've spent years drugging myself and vomiting my guts out every few months, and I've been no the edge of sepsis several times. Never panicked in response to any of that. Everyone who knows or has known me knows that I most definitely do not take care of my health as much as I should. I'm very much the opposite of someone who would have a panic attack in response to acid reflux.
He really pissed me off, but at least he did book me in to see someone in person a few days from then.
The thing is that the person I saw — even though he was a lot more patient and listened a lot more — had the very same conclusion.
It's like they see "anxiety" in my records and just fucking reduce all of my issues to being anxiety-caused. According to these lazy fucks, there's no illness I could possibly have that wouldn't be anxiety-related. I could come in with cancer symptoms one day, but they would say I'm being hypochondriac nutter.
That last guy also looked at my blood test results while I was there and said they were "perfect". The funny thing is that my usual GP called me a few days later to tell me that my blood results were bad. So yeah, I was right to not trust what he had to say!
A week or so later, I booked an in person appointment with the aforementioned usual GP. I told her everything about the burning pressure pain episode that night. I told her how I didn't trust the last doctor, because he was obviously wrong to say my blood test results were "perfect".
Unfortunately, her conclusion was the same as theirs. At this point, I was forced to try to understand where they were coming from. All they had to go on was a normal ECG and extremely elevated blood pressure. They have no idea what it was, so if they're going to try to come up with a conclusion, it is going to sound silly simply because it is likely to be inaccurate.
Since my usual GP actually cares about me, she at least booked me in for an extra ECG. More importantly, an echocardiogram, mainly to check if my mitral valve prolapse is an active issue.
I've had both done. The echo was done on Monday (14 Oct 2024). I don't know the results yet.
A part of me hopes that mitral valve prolapse is still active and that it explains all the weird sensations in and around my heart. I mean, that's better than most other things it could possibly be.
If they don't find anything, I'm going to lose so much hope in the NHS, because there very clearly is something going on!
