(Image of The Doctor by WonKowen)
For right now I’m just writing about what I’m thinking about and I’ve been dealing with a new health weirdness that is taking up a lot of my mental space. So here we go.
A few weeks back I had a few day period where out of nowhere my heart would start racing. Like, I was laying down in bed resting because I didn’t feel good and when I checked my pulse it was 165 bpm. A normal resting heart rate should be 60-100 bpm. On top of that when my heart really got going I would get woozy, at the worst my whole body would start shaking, my head would throb, and I would be short of breath. At a certain point I wrote it off as anxiety, took a Xanax and a pot gummy (it’s legal in my state) and went to bed. After that I felt better so I didn’t worry about it. I brought it up in my last doctors appointment (chronic health issues = regular doctors appointments) and he asked me to just let him know if it happened again. So, of course, Friday night it started again. (Why is it always on the weekend that these things pop up? If it was Tuesday I could just call my doctor.) This time the dizziness has been a nightmare. For example this morning when I got out of bed I was walking around the foot of the bed and I sat down hard of the floor because I though I was for sure going to fall over or faint. I’m understandably concerned that it could be something cardiac. I had COVID twice (thanks immune system) and I know that there are studies showing that it can do long term heart damage. I’m also wondering if it could be something with my lungs. I’ve had issues with my breathing most of my life and add to that COVID twice and I live in wildfire country (that’s unfortunately most of the country these days) and whatever I’m dealing with got worse when the smoke got worse. So this is all I’ve been doing for almost three days. Resting, getting scared by how dizzy I get when I stand up, and obsessing. I’m just thinking myself in circles.
The most logical thing to do in this situation would be to go to urgent care or even the emergency room since it’s a holiday weekend and I can’t even call my doctor until Tuesday. But I have some very major hesitations about doing that. A few years back I got a really nasty flu. When I saw my doctor at the time she told me that she was concerned about pneumonia and that if I started feeling short of breath she wanted me to go to the emergency room. (Yes, that absolutely terrified me and stressed me out.) So when I started having trouble breathing I went to the emergency room. I told them all of this at intake but I was a woman over a certain age complaining of shortness of breath they were concerned about heart attack. I knew for a fact I was not having a heart attack but they basically told me they were not going to check anything else until I had an EKG. This was before my adventures in chronic illness so I still trusted doctors more than I trusted myself and I didn’t argue. They did the EKG, it was normal and then moved onto other tests. But because the EKG was normal and frankly not needed my health insurance refused to cover it. I believe the bill that I received for just the EKG was $1,500. At the time where I was in my life it might as well have been $1,000,000 it felt just as possible to pay that.
So here I am now potentially having a heart issue that might need to be checked out. But I’m not comfortable going into urgent care or the emergency room because I don’t want to be hit with a bill I can’t pay for a test I didn’t actually need. And that right there is a huge part of what is wrong with healthcare in our country. I should be able to go into a doctor or a hospital and say “something is wrong” and get the help I need without the added worry. Now, I don’t think that I am having a heart attack, but I also know that heart attacks are often missed in women. Some people think this is due to women having a higher pain tolerance. There are also newer studies that show the heart attack symptoms present differently in women. This is another problem with the healthcare system as we know it. Most studies and lists of symptoms are based exclusively on men and have been for as long as there have been medical studies. Unless it’s directly related to women’s anatomy there are far less likely to be studies on women. It’s a fairly recent development to realize that some commonly discussed physical and mental illnesses get overlooked in women because the symptoms are different and they just never bothered to study them in women. Or assumed that women didn’t experience these issues based on no presenting with the same symptoms. This is why you can find so many women on TikTok talking about being diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorders or ADHD as adults. These videos show equal parts relief and frustrations. Relief that they make more sense to themselves and frustration that they had to wait so long. Somehow the medical profession missed the memo that men and women are different. Strange.
I wish I lived in a world where I could just focus on this one issue. I don’t feel good. But for me and for many women (and even more so if you are a person of color or LGBTQ or have a bigger body) if you are sick and asking for help it becomes a damn political issue. The stereotype is that if you’re a woman and sick and they can’t find it quickly you’re told it’s in your head and given anxiety meds or antidepressants. If you are heavier you’re told to lose weight, without the doctor looking at anything else. And don’t get me started on the need for trans inclusive healthcare. It’s hard enough to take care of these bodies we live in in this broken world without the system that in theory is supposed to exist to help fighting us.
Screaming in the Dark 