Not sure if everyone feels pain the same way I do, but I notice if the pain is sharp enough it shoots up from the limb to my heart. For example if I slam my fingers hard enough or if I keep my hand in ice-cold water for too long. The pain will shoot up my arm and then squeeze my heart. I’m not asking for medical advice or facts or anything like that.
Who else feels this?
Well, I know who you *should *be asking.
Don’t do that.
Don’t ask his doctor?
I kind of feel like maybe you SHOULD be asking a professional for medical advice?
Doctor! Doctor! It hurts when I do this.
Go to the Emergency Room, NOW!
Not trying to be a dick, but you said the same thing to me when I had some minor issues after exercising.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=716998&highlight=interval
If we all lived in Canada, or Germany or the UK or any nation with a working health care system I could understand going to the ER for every weird body reaction. But for a lot of us, going to the ER means spending half a years rent or mortgage payments on medical care that isn’t covered by insurance. Sucks, but not everyone can or wants to afford that.
I get that once in a while too. With me its just heartburn.
It freaked me out as well when I first had. Thought I was having early stages of heart disease
I’m not clear about the exact symptom. Do I feel chest pain whenever I injure an extremity? Absolutely not. I don’t know anyone else who does, either.
But what exactly do you mean? Do you feel intense pain in the center of your chest EVERY TIME you feel a lesser pain in some other part of your body? If so, then you do need medical attention. However, if your entire LIFE has been that way, chances are that whatever is unique about your nervous system isn’t harmful.
I read a long while ago, that there are no sensory nerves in our hearts, which is why a heart attack usually shows up as pain elsewhere, classically in your left arm. So pain you feel in your chest isn’t going to be your HEART having pain, it’s going to be your chest muscles, or perhaps a nerve in the area being pinched.
I used to regularly suffer what I jokingly called fake heart attacks almost every day. I had a quirky arrangement of nerves in my chest, which if I failed to sit up more or less at attention, would get pinched, and hurt so much and so fast, that I would lurch over and shout in pain. But my pulse never fluctuated, so I was able to work out that it was a harmless posture-related problem.
I don’t know medicine, I’m mostly an historian and mechanical-item service tech. But I’ve heard of medical conditions of various kinds which result in lots of unusual pains, similar to what you describe.
It’s the dilemma when giving advice. What you had described would probably have gotten most internists getting the call to give the same recommendation, even though more often than not it would not have been a heart attack in progress. But dang, the story is that suddenly a similar intensity of exercise as previously done is causing persistent chest pain, tightness, difficulty breathing … that really does have to be considered a heart attack until proven otherwise.
I won’t give advice on this one (and explicitly none was requested) but I will answer the op’s question: no it does not happen to me and it sounds odd.
If it’s heartburn it’s pretty easy to test. Drink something. If it immediately subsides then you can focus on the cause of the heartburn.
As for the money you think you’re saving, consider what a heart attack costs. Preventative medicine will save you money. Do you let your car fall apart to save money? If your roof is leaking do you ignore that?
It’s time you sat down with a pencil and paper and prioritized your budget.
Also, your insurance includes a checkup each year so there isn’t any real cost involved.
Consider heart attack statistics and age. If I were 75 years old when this happened, I would’ve gone to the ER. But I was in my mid 30s at the time. I have some risk factors, but I also have some protective factors in my favor too aside from age (I was exercising at the time, I’m a non smoker, I eat certain dietary items that are shown to reduce health risks, etc).
To me, people in their 20s and 30s worrying every weird body reaction is cancer or heart disease is baseless. These are diseases of age, people under 40 get them, but its not common. Sure people can say ‘I know so and so who had a heart attack at 27’. Yes, but ignoring the reality that they are diseases of age is kind of silly, how is that different from worrying everytime you forget something in your 30s it is because you have alzheimers disease. AZ is also a disease of aging.
It is unrelated, but preventative medicine doesn’t save money. It costs money according to some studies because the increase in life expectancy costs more than the savings from lower morbidity. Being healthy is good for quality of life, but it won’t save money in the long run.
Annual health checkups may not be too effective either.
Point is, for some of us worrying everything that goes wrong is going to kill us will only drive us into bankruptcy while doing nothing to improve our health or quality of life.
yes but there are no do-overs with a fatal heart attack. Pain serves a purpose as an early warning system. Even heartburn is dangerous if ignored long enough.
I’m wondering if some people missed the fact that the OP is inducing these symptoms himself through self inflicted injury and voluntary physical distress.
Not sure if some people are or are not. Thing is that description of a feeling of “squeezing” his heart …
Not my area and not qualified to give medical advice about that but squeezing heart pain is sort of the classic word phrase people use for angina, which is the pain description not of a heart attack per se but heart tissue not getting enough oxygen.
Sure, same phrases sometimes used to describe GERD or GERD-like conditions.
Could the stress of self-imposed pain put a demand on the heart results in ischemia and thus in angina? Probably more likely than triggering GERD I’d think.
But to the best of my knowledge it is not a normal thing that the op is describing. I’ve not been asked what to do about it, we’ve been specifically told such advice is not sought, but if it was me I’d be concerned. Maybe not ED concerned but minimally contacting my doctor concerned and not being surprised if my doctor ordered a work-up, inclusive of an EKG, an echo, and a stress test.
Yes there is something to be said for “pre-test probability”… but that description you gave? Even for a 30 year old it was classic enough for worrisome things to outweigh the age factor and the costs of inaction for a true positive was dramatic enough that the advice to get evaluated would be pretty standard I’d think.
I get heartburn from time to time, but the OP’s symptoms don’t sound anything like regular old heartburn. Peripheral nerve stimulation causing a squeezing pain in the heart sounds like something that should require consultation with a medical expert.
My concern for the OP is that (s)he is looking for other people with similar symptoms to reassure (s)him that there’s no need to worry about (s)his condition.
“I’m not asking for medical advice or facts or anything like that.”
“Who else feels this?”
I just assumed those were work-related situations and/or recreational blunders.
But, yeah, if the OP is describing some kind of masochistic hobby, maybe switching to stamp collecting would be advisable.
