Heart Damage?

I'm feeling frustrated with the cardiologists review of my tests. I felt like I walked out of there with the usual non-answers. He said the heart was not pumping enough blood as well as it could be and that my heart rate was fast because of that.

I tried to combine that with what we knew from the previous tests, my symptoms, and my previous treatment but he acted as if they were exclusive and would not answer why the heart was like this, what it meant, how or if this would progress and what we would do about it. Sounds like every other doctor I speak too.

I'm so tired of giving the doctor my symptoms, having them pacify or play down what it could be, until it is that and then never acknowledging that the symptoms where there all along. I looked up heart not pumping blood which leads to congestive heart failure (CHF), which he mentioned casually, but I have no doubt he specifically did not use this term because of how scary it sounds.

Looking up CHF is awful, I have lots of the symptoms (mild as they are right now) and there is no treatment. The worst part is I’m not even done cancer treatment; I still have so many heart/ lung damaging drugs yet to take.

Cancer Addict

Walking into the hospital today I observed the construction sign for the addition as future site of the new Cancer Addiction Center. I thought who the hell gets addicted to cancer? And then started daydreaming about an AA style meeting, someone standing up and confessing that they started with a mild skin cancer but that wasn't enough so they got into lung cancer and then a little bit of myeloma.

They daydream became so absurd that I started to question what the Cancer Addiction Center might really be... only to reread that the sign was for the future home of the new Cancer Center Addition.

My brain is doing this all the time, making up words, switching numbers, letters and words. It's getting worse, but sometimes very funny.

Kickstart my Heart

The last hour of wearing my 48 hour heart holter monitor seemed like the longest hour of my life. Funny how the memory of pain and discomfort fades because I'm pretty sure having that giant needle stabbed into my heart last year was worse… but none the less, I couldn’t claw those sticky jumper cables off my chest fast enough. It felt like I had been wearing a tight corset for two days and I just needed to bust out (literally!)

I have continued to have a racing/ random jumpy heart since this whole thing started so I went back to my doctors for an x-ray and then another echocardiogram yesterday. My original echocardiogram showed that the current looping round one side of my heart was a bit “jiggly” as the report put it. Not that I knew until I went back complaining of it yet again.

The original follow-up I received from my hematologist was that my heart was fine. Lesson: Do not get your hematologist to interpret a cardiac report, get a cardiologist. So this time I have scheduled an apt with the cardiologist to discuss the follow-up report. Hopefully we will get to the bottom of this crazy heart thing.

It makes me feel very vulnerable to have my heart acting wonky all the time, more so than having cancer. I never feel like I could drop dead with cancer, but I sure feel that way about my heart. It mostly bothers me when I'm sleeping because it’s always racing, I never feel at rest. It reminds me of when I was a kid and we would be camping in some spooky woods and I couldn’t get to sleep because I was terrified by all the night noises and that there was some dude with an axe right out side the tent.
Ya like that, it feels like I'm scared all the time and my heart is racing except the only scary thing in my bedroom at night is likely me – bed-head, ugly pj’s, morning breathe = racing heart?

I also get what I can only describe as a surge or a whooshing feeling in my heart randomly. Anyone who has ever had a picc or port might understand this, it feels like when the nurse would flush your line with saline really fast and you could feel the whoosh of fluid into your heart. Except there’s no line now, so where is the feeling coming from?

I also have an overall heaviness in my heart that is hard to tell if it’s my heart or lungs. When I exercise I feel I reach an exertion limit where I know my heart and lungs just can’t do anymore no matter what. Sometimes if I talk too long or get laughing to hard I start to cough, and other times I just have a general ache and prickly stabs from the top of my heart (where the cancer is left) that bother me. But these seem mild now compared to the discomfort of the holter!