Starting on Saturday the 17th, I started noticing some very light intermittent chest pains that felt like they were to the right of my sternum. They would come and go, seemingly not triggered by any particular thing. For a week or so prior, I had also been getting nausea for about only 5-10 minutes a day and had general stomach upset. Also had a couple of weird other symptoms that I won’t go into detail about here (and that I think were unrelated). The chest pains however raised a red flag to me real fast, and especially due to my vigorous exercise schedules, I decided to get this checked out and went to the doctor. This is the same DO doc that I had gone to previously to get checked on for heart palpitations. As of today, I have had three EKGs (electrocardiograms), all of which have come out normal.
Today however I got a hefty blood test with the complete metabolic panel, Vitamin D, magnesium, B12, a urinalysis, and some other things. I also got a chest x-ray. I’m anxiously awaiting my lab results, but my doc analyzed my chest x-ray right away. It was the end of the day when I got a call from his assistant who left a voicemail on my machine stating, “He said your chest xray looked fine but that there was some ‘nonspecific hyperinflammation,’ and that if I had any questions to give her a call back, but that otherwise all was fine.”
I was thinking, ok – what does that even mean – hyper-inflammation of WHAT exactly? What a nondescript voicemail. I tried to call back, but their offices were officially closed so I didn’t get anywhere with that. I ended up doing some research on my own and realized she probably meant “nonspecific hyperinflation” – meaning my lungs were overinflated (since there was really nothing on hyper-inflammation and it didn’t make much sense to me anyway) . Hyper-inflation can be a symptom of COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), but since I have no symptoms of that, I realized it was probably because I took a huge breath during the x-ray like the x-ray tech told me to do.
All in all, I really don’t think I have anything seriously wrong with me – but more that I want to find out what the heck is causing chest pain so that I know if I need to be careful of anything or if there’s anything in general I need to do to take care of it. Unfortunately it can be very difficult (and expensive) to get at the source, but we’ll see what happens once the lab tests get back. I also have a visit with a cardiologist on Monday. I would love to have an echocardiogram, which is basically an ultrasound of your heart to evaluate it for any structural problems, but unfortunately those are really expensive so after all of this fun stuff I don’t know if I will be able to afford it just yet.
In the meantime, here’s my x-ray, in case you ever wanted to see a chest x-ray:
