Hey everyone.

I feel rather selfish posting here a second time, given that I've neglected to hand out any hugs of my own!

Have been having a rough time of it for the past month, and I'm just so worn out.
I don't have health anxiety, and I'm not even sure I really have anxiety in general any more, but this week I've definitely struggled with a sense of panic. I suppose it's kind of warranted.

Recently, I started getting long episodes of ectopic beats. I don't mean a flutter here and there, but chest kicking, breath stealing horribleness for hours and hours, with barely any peace in between. I have a little home use ECG, recommended by my GP as we had never been able to catch the occasional ectopics I would complain of, and they said to try and get at least one. I had given up on using it, as they had been so sporadic and would be gone by the time I got my fingers on the sensors. Now, with them coming on every few minutes, I finally caught them. I felt every single one, and finally had a visual of what was happening. I didn't panic, I just thought "oh, finally I have something to show my GP".

I stuck it out for a few days, until I started getting chest and arm pain. Off to A&E I went, having ticked off sufficient red flags to seek medical attention. And the heart gods being cruel jokesters, decided to make the ectopics behave for the 10 seconds they ran an ECG on me. They looked at my home ECG readouts and confirmed frequent ectopics, some in bigeminy, and took some bloods. Bloods were fine. No heart attack, electrolytes all good, and no heart murmur according to their stethoscope. So I was sent home and told to get a full cardio workup. Said ectopics are usually benign once there's no heart disease or structural issue with heart. Given my other symptoms, they said I should definitely have my heart looked at.

And that's the part that makes me worried. I've never heart my structure checked, and apparently I've been walking around with very worrying levels of cholesterol for maybe 10 years. I had no idea as my GP had said my overall number wasn't too high, but the A&E doc explained that the difference between good and bad cholesterol meant I should have been on statins years ago. Despite a healthy diet, the numbers stayed the same, but never got addressed.

So doc surgery called me to set up an appointment once they saw my updated records, only the earliest appointment is a month away. Am I walking around with heart disease? I hope not, but now the last year of agonising fatigue, chest pain, numb extremities, a sudden increase in palpitations and pre-syncope don't really paint a healthy picture. I've been dismissed for being too young/not fat enough/a non smoker/drinker etc.

I didn't post this in health anxiety, as I genuinely am not in an anxious state, I'm just so flipping tired and want to cry. Yes I have the normal levels of human concern given I have quite a few worrying factors for heart issues, but I haven't really sat and cooked up insane scenarios. I just want to feel healthy again, and with my heart literally flopping around like a fish all day, it's really difficult to feel like that's an option for me. I have to wait a long time to find out if these are harmless, or a sign of something worse.

I suppose I just want to feel like things will be ok. I'm not sure I have the mental capacity to keep pretending that everything's fine to friends and family.

If anybody has words of encouragement, or just a funny joke, or even a whinge of their own, please share