Dreaming in Iambic Pentameter

This is my second 24 hour Holter Monitor experience. The first occurred way back in January 2006, around the time my thyroid issues were diagnosed, back when I still thought I would live forever.

Anyway if I ever get around to writing that book I’m sure my Blog will provide useful notes, so I thought on this occasion I’d write about this test in more detail.

I have seven electrodes taped to my torso. Three form a triangle on my upper chest above my breasts. One is on my left breast and two on the rib cage beneath and around it. The final one is on my right side. Wires from these plug into a joiner, which hangs at my upper thigh. The single thick cable from the joiner leads into a device a little larger than a standard iPod. This sits in a black canvas pouch held by a strap which passes diagonally across my body, much like I would carry a shoulder bag in a well known mugging zone.

Obviously this device records my heartbeat on a removable chip. If I experience any irregularities I am supposed to press a button on the unit which will help them zero in on the part of the recording to examine. Nothing so far.

I can’t get the device wet, and the loose tee shirt (no bra) I am wearing does not fully cover the mess of wires or the black pouch. So, I won’t be making many trips out today. (Of course, I have to do the gymnastics run later.)

So what can you do while wearing a Holter Monitor? Laundry, drink tea, whine and write. That pretty much sums it up.

Watch the clip. I do look a bit earnest and chubby but at least the message is out there.

Because I’ll be on it, in a nutshell.

Basically, a while ago I was chatting with my friend P and she was telling me a long saga of woes about her problems with Sears. Things had gotten so bad that eventually she lodged a complaint with Channel 6 Action News Consumer Hotline.

Hmm. I thought. Perhaps they would be interested in hearing about my health problems and suspicions that Yasmin is the root cause. So I did the same.

Now, I don’t believe they ever got back to P about Sears, but about a month ago a very nice reporter called me and we had a long chat. She said she needed to follow up independently and would get back to me.

A week later she called again. Apparently she had found another young woman (32) in the Philadelphia area who had died of a stroke after being on Yasmin, and she wanted to run with the story.

So the following week she turned up at my house (Yes, in the Action News van) with a cameraman and interviewed me. It was a fascinating experience. They shot most of the footage of me sitting at my kitchen table, but then they wanted to get some additional footage for voiceover: me taking my daily aspirin, me making a cup of tea, me reading to the kids, the kids playing with the dog, and the family group photo we had taken before Christmas. (yes, even Keba isn’t safe!)

They asked me not to blog it until they had started running the trailers for it, which apparently began last night. So I didn’t, but now I am.

I may sound terrible (I hate my voice in recordings normally) and look like an earnest frumpy housewife, but I don’t care. Women need to be warned that they should think more about the hormones they elect to put in their bodies, and no one else seemed prepared to tell them.

So I did.

I spent five hours in the E.R. last night.

Let’s back up a bit. It might be helpful to read this entry followed by this entry and finally this entry if you haven’t been following the strange case of my deteriorating health quite as closely as, for some reason, I have been.

The only thing I need add, which I coyly hadn’t mentioned assuming it was irrelevant, is that when I had my ovarian surgery I figured I’d get a tubal ligation. After all, the doctor was in there anyway, and I’m definitely done reproducing at this point. (I love my daughters, but Becky is just two years off babysitting age, and then the world of poetry opens up to me just a little bit more.)

So the recovery from surgery had been going pretty well, and then a couple of weeks ago I started getting significantly increased heart palpitations. Now I’m used to my heart murmur–it goes with the PFO, doncha know? But these palpitations were different: stronger, longer, and much more frequent.

I considered the possible causes, and the first thing that occurred to me was that my thyroid hormone was out of whack. After all, it is my opinion that the evil birth control drug from hell, otherwise known as Yasmin, was responsible for tipping my thyroid into hypothyroidism in the first place. Stands to reason that now I am no longer taking it, the synthetic hormone levothyroxine might be over-compensating, and I might have tipped into hyperthyroidism, for which one of the symptoms is palpitations. So I got a blood test and made an appointment (this coming Wednesday) to see my doctor about the results.

Then last Saturday I started the period from hell. I’ll spare you the gory details out of consideration for my male readers. But think the River of Blood from the Seventh Circle of Dante’s Inferno, and you can’t go far wrong. I had my OB-GYN follow up appointment on Wednesday, and she said that unfortunately increased flow was normal following a tubal ligation. When I did my own research, I discovered another little advertised complication was heart palpitations. Funny you should say that…

On Wednesday night I had a twenty-five minute episode of palpitations with chest pain, which panicked the hell out of me. I called Keba, and he talked me down from going to the ER, telling me instead to go for a walk and see if the pain got worse or went away. It went away.

But yesterday afternoon while I was driving the kids to gymnastics the same thing happened. I could only drive by putting one hand on the steering wheel and holding the seatbelt off my chest. This is not normal. I dropped Becky, took Lorna to a friend’s and had that friend drive me to the ER.

The ER was of course totally backed up, and by the time we arrived the pains had subsided, so we waited for some 21/2 hours. Eventually they got me into a room, hooked me up to the heart rate monitor, did an EKG, a chest X-ray and took blood.

Clearly they took me very seriously given my medical history. The really nice (and yes, good-looking–where do they get these guys?) doctor was fascinated by it in fact. However the tests showed nothing fundamentally wrong with my heart.

Theory A: Thyroid imbalance–> Increased Palpitations –> Heart Muscle Fatigue –> Chest Pain

Theory B: Increased Blood Clotting –> More clots passing PFO –> Chest Pain

Theory C (My own): Female Hormone Imbalance Post Surgery –> Heart Palpitations (see theory A)

Anyway, I need to get a Holter Monitor test (again!) and pursue the thyroid imbalance theory following up with my regular doctor next week. The female hormone imbalance theory (Post Tubal Ligation Syndrome) does not of course have much credibility with the medical establishment.

Sigh. Thanks again to all the Virtua Memorial Staff, and my good friends Maureen and Gail who kept the kids etc. etc.

I am planning to write a non-fiction book on all my health experiences once I have graduated from Bennington, (assuming no one is rushing to hire me as a teacher of formal poetry, ha!) I am interested in hearing from any woman who has had similar experiences following taking Yasmin. Contact me.