My scary week, Part 3
Read Part 1 and Part 2 before going any further.
At some point during the morning, my doctor asked me about tests that my New York cardiologist had run. She wanted to see the results of the echocardiogram Dr. NY had administered, but I didn't have his phone number. So I told her his name and his city, naively thinking that the hospital would be able to get ahold of, or at least confirm the existence of, any doctor in the country. Throughout the morning, a nurse or an aide would ask me to clarify Dr. NY's name and city because they couldn't find him or even any evidence of him. After several hours of this confusion, my wife called her brother in Austin and asked him to see if he could find the doctor on the Web. He found Dr. NY's number while they were on the phone. That shook my confidence in the hospital a little. I gave my nurse the phone number, but they still couldn't get ahold of the doctor.
A cardiologist in the hospital came to visit me at one point while my wife was there. He told me that he had gone over all the test results and that everything looked normal. He said I probably had mitral valve prolapse, a heart condition that can allow a little blood to flow back into the the left atrium once it has passed into the left ventricle. It can cause symptoms similar to mine and is fairly common. He said he would know for sure once he was able to look at my echocardiogram from New York. He also told me that it is nothing to worry about, that it is relatively harmless, and that it's better to live with the symptoms than with the side effects of the medication that would alleviate the discomfort. Immediately after he left the room, my wife looked at me quizzically and asked, "Did he just tell you to suck it up?" I think he did.
Anyway, the NY echocardiogram seemed to be a long time coming, so they finally just administered one themselves. Shortly thereafter, the cardiologist came back to see me and reported that the test displayed no signs of MVP. However much my irregular heart beats disturbed me, they appeared to be benign in nature. The tightness in my chest could have been caused by any of a number of non-cardiac-related events. He said he would recommend to my attending physician that I be released. He didn't say this in so many words, but this is how I interpreted his statements: "You have a strong, healthy, well-formed heart. You don't smoke, drink, or suffer from stress. Your cholesterol level is fine, as is your blood pressure. You have no family history of heart disease. Exertion does away with your irregular heartbeats rather than exacerbating them. All the tests we've run have come back negative. And you're only 31 years old. We can't figure out what's wrong with you, so it's probably nothing serious. Suck it up." Both my regular doctor and my cardiologist echoed those thoughts when I later followed up with them in New York.
So they let me go. The nurse who discharged me assured me I had done the right thing in coming to the hospital. A lot of people with my symptoms ignore them and end up dying as a result. She scolded me a little, however, for coming to the hospital in a car rather than an ambulance. An ambulance has oxygen tanks, medicines, medical tools, and people trained to use them whereas a grandparent's car usually has none of those. Also, people who arrive in an ambulance are usually fast-tracked and not shunted off to the waiting room for seven hours. Now I know.
I thought that I would feel silly if I went to the hospital only to find out there's nothing wrong with me. Instead, I feel relieved. That pressure lasted about a week, and I would have been an absolute nervous wreck after half a day had I not been under the care of doctors. As it is, my mind is now at ease for the most part. I would have preferred to have a more definitive diagnosis, but medicine is an inexact science. Whatever the case, I'll be around for a good while longer, God willing.
