Several months ago I developed a condition in which, when I’m lying down at night, sometimes my heart would skip a beat. It can be kind of unnerving and sometimes it wakes me up just as I’m about to go to sleep. Usually it’s just one or two times a night, but sometimes it gets frequent enough that I get so nervous I can’t go to sleep. When it first happened, I went to my doctor and had an EKG, blood tests, and a chest X-Ray. None of those showed anything. My doctor then attributed it to stress.
It only happens when I’m lying down, getting ready for sleep. Either side, on my back or stomach. Is there a name for this? Does anyone else experience it? My doctor has written it off, but should I be worried? Could stress (maybe coupled with being pretty out of shape) really be the culprit?
I experience that occasionally. I had an EKG, but of course my heart didn’t do it while I was hooked up. The doctor said I could wear a heart monitor for a day, but he didn’t make it sound like it was that big a deal, so I just haven’t felt that concerned about it. I question whether it’s necessarily tied to stress, though. I might have an episode of it every few months or so, and I have never noticed that it tends to happen when I’m stressed; it seems pretty random.
Same thing for me. Well…an episode isn’t one isolated occurence, but a period of variable duration during which I’ve several occurences/ day, at worst a number of occurences within a short duration (say, half an hour) several times a day.
And though the fisrt explanation I got was roughly “it’s in your head”, I never could notice any obvious trend. It can happen during a stresful period, or during an peaceful one. When I smoke as well as when I quit smoking (which I did several times). When I drink cofee or not. It seems indeed random to me, or at least I never managed to figure out the factor(s) involved.
I’ve also some normally unimportant heart condition I don’t know the name of in english (a problem in the heart nervous circuitry), but I’ve been told it’s probably unrelated to this “irregular heart beats” issue (though to my uneducated eye it would seem logical that both are related).
To say the truth, nobody ever gave me any explanation beyond “don’t worry” (and I still worry), including a cardiologist. The last thread on the SD has been on the overall more helpful than the doctors.
I’d be interested in the older thread, since I have a very similar problem to what clairobscur describes. My doctor also said it was nothing to worry about, but it’s more than a little unnerving.
Thanks for the replies, everybody. They put my mind at ease. It really is just the heart, no coughing or breathing difficulties. And something in that other thread reminded me that it started to happen soon after I began to drink coffee regularly, every morning, for the first time in my life. I’m gonna try to cut down on the caffeine and see what happens.
