Ok, I’ve said this story so many times..Hopefully this will be the last time??
Let’s start off: I am a 20 year old, male, university student, in fairly decent shape.
I had been smoking pot avidly for about 2 years, and cigarettes for about 2 months.
One day, after smoking a little bit of weed with my buddy, I walked back to my room, and I noticed my heart was beating a little fast. Nothing too out of the ordinary, I thought. However, after sitting down at my chair for a few minutes, it was still picking up speed. Now it will be good for all of you to know, that I am a hypochondriac. I overreact about every little thing about my health. I feel a pain? Must be some horrible disease.. Anyways after a good 4 minutes of my heart racing and beginning to pound, I freaked out and decided it would be a good idea to go to my neighbours and tell them about my heart. As I stood up and walked down the stairs to their room, the muscles in my abdomen all tensed up. I started to get worried, ran over to their room, came in and told them I thought I was dying. They told me it was the funniest thing they had ever seen. A fully baked kid stumbling into their room screaming bloody murder. One of them checked my pulse, realized how fast it was going, and gave me a plastic bag to breathe into, telling me it was probably an anxiety attack. I did that for a few minutes, and it calmed me down. I was shaking for a good 3 hours after that (seems pretty normal since I thought I was dying).
The next day, is when it all began… I was starting to experience anxiety attacks every day. Even after I hadn’t been smoking anything. I would be in bed, trying to sleep, and all of a sudden my nerves would just hit me for no reason and I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep (felt like I was falling through midair or something). 2 weeks go by with these symptoms and chest pains begin along with shortness of breath. I’m not talking about just during these panic episodes, I’m talking like all day. They weren’t that painful, but just enough so to be really annoying and uncomfortable. I scheduled a doctor’s appointment, and she scheduled an Echocardiogram and a Holter monitor test for 2 weeks from then. Before I could even get to the hospital to do those, I had a pretty bad episode which made me check myself into ER for a few hours. They did an ECG (or EKG I don’t remember), a chest X-ray, and a blood test. All came back fine, and they let me go. I felt pretty good after that for about 24 hours until the symptoms returned. At this point, I am experiencing chest pains (generally left side, sometimes mid-chest, and left upper back, stabbing pains), shortness of breath (not always), heart palpitations, and a rise in my heart beat. I went back to the doctor and she prescribed me with some Lorazepam (ativan) to take when I had an attack. Also, the results of my echocardiogram came back fine, and I’m still waiting on the holter.
So here I am today, after all of this, still experience the occasional heart palpitations, and shortness of breath. I went paintballing today with my residence and after 4 hours of running around, my heart rate took a LONG time to go back down, and I was experiencing chest + back pains all day. I have only smoked pot 3 times after the initial attack (and given up cigarettes completely!). The first time I began to have a panic attack, but I calmed myself down enough so I could smoke more pot. The second and third times I had pretty bad panic attacks. I’ll go into the third one a bit. After taking a toke, I went and walked my dog. Then I noticed my heart was beating REALLY fast, and I was scared that walking through the snow with my dog would make it beat faster and I would pass out and die, which made me more anxious…. you know the drill.
Anyways, if you actually took the time to read that I appreciate it, sort of like my monologues of my mental health haha. Anyways, now for the point of this post, what should I do?? I can’t seem to relax enough to make these symptoms go away. I had a really good day last week, felt like I was normal for a good 24 hours, then on the bus to the LCBO, I noticed my heart was beating kind of funny, thought I was having an irregular heartbeat episode (hypochondriac, remember?) and I’ve been back into my anxious state since then. I find myself looking up all my symptoms on the internet, and finding all of these horrible heart conditions I could have. I seem to be forgetting that all my tests came back negative for heart disease, but when I have an anxiety attack, I tend to not believe myself and think that I am actually, slowly, dying from an undiagnosed heart disease.
I am so depressed and so overwhelmed, and then I remember seeing that stress can lead to cardiac arrest later on in life..which makes me more stressed..and my chest hurts… and ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
So yeah, can anxiety cause stabbing like chest pains? Feels like I am getting poked really hard in my left side just under my