Thursday, March 15, 2012

Update: Spring Is Here!

With a nice mild winter, now comes an early spring and I'm already nervous. During the winter months, my POTS is always very very tolerable. Sure my heart rates still get very high when I do dishes, laundry or try to move around a lot, but overall, I feel more calm, more relaxed and more at peace with myself. In the summer, I am pretty much incapacitated. I'm not looking forward to it...

This is the first winter I can remember ever, that I did not have to shovel our driveway or walkway. Not even once... Thank goodness too. A few winters ago, we got a ton of snow in this area. I think for the season we must have had about 3-4 feet. Shoveling all of that snow was awful for me. My heart rate was 196 and I felt like I was dying, literally. I was praying that we wouldn't get snows like that this year because I knew I couldn't do it. Well my prayer was answered.

Over the winter I got strep throat which ended up being untreated. I didn't realize I had strep throat so I never went to the doctors. It took about 2 weeks to finally start to feel like myself again. About 2 weeks after that I noticed my joints were really hurting and I had these weird sores on my ankles and shins. To make a long story short, I had complications from the strep infection. It caused my joints and bones to ache severely. I had developed erythema nodosum which ended up lasting about 6-7 weeks. It was 6-7 weeks of pure hell. The pain was a 9/10. The swelling ended up becoming just as painful as the joint pain. I was miserable.

Through all of this, my heart started to hurt a lot more and I was getting PVC's too. However with POTS as all of you know, it can be very difficult to distinguish symptoms. Where does POTS end and where does another condition start? With all of this, I now have to rule out rheumatic fever. I am getting an echocardiogram done Monday and will be wearing a lovely holter monitor. :)

Hopefully everything comes back fine and no harm is done. As we enter the warmer months, I will likely be dropping by a lot more.

1 comment:

  1. Read this:

    http://www.scielo.org.ve/scielo.php?pid=S0798-02642000000200008&script=sci_arttext

    Maybe alumium is behind your problem.

    ReplyDelete