Paper Heart

Secret #24:I have a sensitive heart. I don't mean emotional (although...haha). I have mitral valve prolapse and easily induced tachycardia. Those aren't necessarily connected, they just happened to be two diagnosis I got at age 16. I kept blacking out from time to time and my heart would easily get up to 180 while exercising. My dad listened to my heart, heard a few murmurs and set me up with a cardiologist the next day. I was prescribed this medicine that keeps your heart slowed down. What's creepy about it is that it says in bold letters "Warning: May cause heart failure" etc. etc. That was a fun few days. What's worse is getting OFF the medicine. You have to wean yourself off. If you quit cold turkey, you have a strong chance of your heart just stopping.

Nothing really huge in particular that I deal with. Occasionally palpitations, which is a fluttering feeling in your chest and sort of takes your breath away for a bit. Sometimes chest discomfort.

Secret #25:I had a very rough labor to where my contractions were all 10 seconds apart. i had a horrible reaction to an induction medicine and I was losing lots of blood, borderline uterine rupture - where your baby dies and you most likely bleed out. They gave me an injection that's used to STOP labor. Unfortunately that medication shot my heart rate up to 170. I was in a pickle for sure. :) Strong labor that needed to be slowed or I'd potentially bleed to death, or heart rate so fast it could cause a heart attack. They took their chances on the heart and I was given another dose of another medicine, along with 5 different antibiotics for the mitral valve prolapse issue (I have to have antibiotics even when getting dental work done).

Overall, my body is just super sensitive to hormones, narcotics, and caffeine. I'm not exactly a great candidate for childbearing. For some reason I just don't deal with any of it well as far as the pregnancy and labor goes. I'm by no means a hypochondriac. I would MUCH rather be healthy all the time. I'm proud to admit I have an immune system of steel. I just don't take medicine and certainly watch my caffeine intake.

Oh, man, guys! Thanks so much for #15 on explore!