Cardiologist appointment

Last month, I had what I have since referred to as a “heart scare.” To get all the details about what had happened, see here. Part of my follow-up instructions was to see a cardiologist at a heart care center. This place is located at a local hospital, locally referred to as RiverBend. I had scheduled the appointment late last month and that appointment was today.

Before my appointment, however, I kept trying to figure out just what the heck had happened. I’d been having this severe chest pain usually once a month for some time now. It gets so bad that I honestly think I’m having a heart attack. I recently changed my diet and started taking aspirin every day, but I’ve still been troubled over just what the cause of this might be. I actually started to look it up on the Internet yesterday and pretty much stopped when the results brought up heart disease. I didn’t want to jump the gun on this. Personal experience has taught me that it’s best to talk to a doctor about things like this rather than trying to “self-diagnose myself” through the Internet.

I still wanted to know what possibilities there were. I talked about it with some people on Facebook yesterday and their comments gave me a lot to think about.

So I went to the appointment today and I handed in the paperwork I’d previously filled out about my medical history, personal habits and so forth. They took my vitals, asked me more questions about my medical experiences and asked me to go more in-depth about these chest pain episodes. What caught my attention was the doctor asking me why I felt the problem was my heart. I wondered why he asked that and broached the subject that maybe the cause was other things. I told the doctor my dad had heart problems and I thought maybe there was a connection there, but that I was also open to the possibility it might be something else or some other reason. The doctor listened to my heart and said everything sounded fine. Aside from my blood pressure being high at the time of this visit, everything else checked out okay. The doctor suggested I take a stress test so they can better test my heart health and so I have to go back when they schedule that test.

I am frustrated that they didn’t have an answer to my chest pain but when I left that appointment, I decided I would try to get a new primary care physician and look into some other options about what could be causing this. It might be the heart. It might be something else. Whatever it is, I hope it can be treated so that I don’t have to deal with those scary and painful episodes anymore.