EP.204/ The Thing that’s been happening with my heart and why it’s important to talk about it in the endo community
On Christmas Day 2021, I thought I had a heart attack. It was Christmas night actually, maybe even the early hours of Boxing Day and I was woken up by one of the worst pains I have ever experienced. It felt like a metal clamp had locked around my heart and was squeezing it to the point of bursting. The pain radiated into my left arm and down into my hand, and my hand and lower arm were tingling and sort of numb. My chest was tight, it felt like I had a weight on it and I felt like I was struggling to get enough oxygen in.
I still don’t know if I had a heart attack that night. My body and mind tells me it was, but at this stage, I’ll never really know – because I didn’t call an ambulance.
Yes. I know it was stupid, and I regret the decision now, but there was a reason.
Now, to understand why I didn’t call an ambulance, I need to give you a bit of history.
This is not the first time I’ve experienced this. In fact, I’ve had heart pain since I was about 19 and it’s never been taken seriously.
The first time, at least I think the first time I had the pain, was after my friend’s birthday party. We had gone all the way up to Birmingham and were staying in a hotel, and my friends got into a really huge argument, and I was caught in between. At the time, I was not in a great place mentally or physically and the argument sent me spiralling and I actually went and sat in the bathroom, in the shower cubicle, to try and drown out the shouting.
The next morning we had to travel back on the train, quite a way, and I had not slept much at all and I’d been drinking heavily the night before, and I started getting this heart pain and breathing problems. I had been walking two and throw between carriages, splitting my time between my friends who had argued, to try and avoid either of them being angry with me when it kicked in. When we got to London, one of my friends took me to A&E and of course, I was told I had had an anxiety attack and I was actually immediately prescribed very heavy anti-anxiety medication and told to follow it up with my GP come Monday. There were no tests run and no examinations.
Naturally I assumed the doctor was right, that it was anxiety, given the situation.
The next day, I went to my GP, who promptly took me off anti-anxiety medication, saying it was too strong, and told me he was sure I could talk to my parents about whatever was bothering me. If you’ve listened to my podcast before, you might have gotten the sense that my parents were and are not the type of people I can talk to about my problems, to put it mildly.
So, I got on with it and then sometime after, honestly it could have been weeks or maybe a year or two, I had it again. The pain and breathing problems occurred during a really stressful event I was running for my then business, which was a fashion magazine, and my business partner just said to me “Jess you’re such a worrier” and I got on with it, even though I felt like I really shouldn’t just be getting on with it. This was also a time when I was drinking regularly, we were a fashion magazine so there were a lot of press parties and things like that we had to attend, and all of us were young and so we’d drink a good few times a week and at least two of those occasions would be heavy drinking, and I was also operating on very little sleep because we were running an insanely fast-paced business, so sometimes I’d literally go two or three days straight without sleeping.
Now I’m not sure when this started, but I will also say that during all of these times, the symptoms were accompanied by heart palpitations and dizziness and the heart palpitations and dizziness weren’t contained to these incidences, in fact, I’d get them very regularly. The dizziness was probably a few times a week but as I aged it became a few times a day, and it would go through phases of being worse and being better.
When I was finally diagnosed with endo at about 24-ish, I spoke to my doctor about the dizziness and heart palpitations being linked to endo and was told that endo wouldn’t cause those symptoms. He didn’t make any suggestions for further investigations and nor did he seem to be concerned about them, he just sort of moved on, and by this point, with a nice medical history involving many, many mental health referrals, an eating disorder clinic, anti-anxiety medication and a family history of depression and suicide attempts, I’m assuming he assumed it was all down to anxiety.
I think I thought it was probably a mix of anxiety and endo, as I had read a lot of endo people experiencing the same symptoms online. I was new to endo and didn’t really understand why it was happening, but I sort of settled into the knowledge that it was probably linked and so I didn’t push further.
Over the years, living with dizziness and palpitations became the norm to me.
Then about four years ago, we moved to Margate. We had chosen a flat in a converted Georgian building and were sort of on the middle floor, but within about 3 months, we ended up moving to the basement flat. There had been a couple above us with a young baby, and the man was abusive to the partner and I was home alone a lot because Chris had a sick parent so he was down in London for sometimes a week or two at a time, and coming from my background of working with vulnerable people and having had experienced abuse myself, it really affected me and I got involved, and it all went south very quickly and as a temporary solution whilst everything was being dealt with, the landlord moved us into the basement flat to keep me away from him. Obviously, he was still in the building but it was supposed to be a temporary solution.
Anyway, shortly after moving in I started to get quite sick. My interstitial cystitis went from being something that I could live with to unbearable, and I was in pain 247, and I started getting the absolute worst allergy symptoms and unbelievable levels of nasal congestion and mucus.
When winter came around a few months later, I was getting myself through feeling under the weather and unfocused with a lot of hot cacaos mixed with lion’s mane and cordyceps. I was probably having about three a day combined with 100% dark chocolate. I was alone a lot because Chris was still caring for his Dad and I was really unhappy in the flat for a few various reasons which just isn’t really important to talk about here, and I was running my new coaching business which made me super anxious and was struggling for money. So I was alone a lot, feeling unwell and also feeling very anxious and chocolate was just sort of my treat as soon as I got off a client call, or as a pick me up when I felt particular foggy in my brain or unwell.
And then one day, I got this searing pain in my heart. Like searing. I don’t think I thought it was a heart attack, I sort of had lived with the palpitations and dizziness for so long, and of course I had had this type of pain before, that I assumed it was related, but this was bad, it was worse than the other times, and so it did scare me. I ignored it for a few minutes and thought you know, if it didn’t come back, then it was probably nothing and I could get on with my day. The issue was, it did come back, again and again and again. So, I called 111, which if you’re not in the UK, is like this NHS helpline and they basically tell you what you should do. And you go through a series of questions and if it’s an emergency they call an ambulance and if it’s not, they get a nurse to call you back and talk about what’s next.
Now, I can’t remember the questions they asked me but I do know that for whatever reason, they didn’t think it was a high risk situation, maybe because I had said I’d been very stressed and anxious. So, I waited maybe several hours or perhaps it was the next day actually, or like the early hours of the morning, but eventually someone called me back and told me to see the GP on the Monday.
So, I went to see the GP on the Monday and they booked me in for a 10-minute ECG, but of course, when I had the ECG, I wasn’t experiencing the chest pain or palpitations at the time, and so it all looked normal. I did explain that I didn’t have any of the symptoms at the time, but they confirmed it was due to anxiety and sent me on my way.
I continued to experience this level of chest pain throughout the entire winter. Sometimes it would be bad, other times it was just there in the background, but either way it was sort of like a constant background thing I was aware of but that I really didn’t know what to do with or what to do about. No one seemed to be concerned and I had so much going on my life that I just needed to keep going.
Now shortly after this time, I came to realise we had a pretty big mould and damp problem in the house, and that I was sensitive to histamines. I had noticed an odd smell when we moved in, but the people before had had cats and so I sort of assumed it was one of those animal smells, although admittedly we’d grown up with cats and my house had never smelt that way!
So, I was put on a low histamine diet by Dr. Jessica Drummond for my interstitial cystitis pain and although that didn’t really help with my bladder pain, my heart pain went away. The dizziness and palpitations continued, but on the whole, everything was much more manageable in that department and my chest pain became a memory, not something I was living with daily.
For the next two years, I lived on some form of a low histamine diet to a degree. So, I wasn’t super strict, but there were some foods I knew I couldn’t eat, and some I kept out for a good year or more, before I started feeling well enough to bring them back in. There were also foods that I loved, which I would have occasionally, like dark chocolate and those hot drinks, and I would notice then that my heart would start racing, pounding in my chest and I would have trouble breathing if I ate a lot of it.
So, I started to notice my triggers were usually caffeine or histamine mediated, and I was also specialising in SIBO at this time, which can cause histamine overload and also, hydrogen sulphide, which is one of the SIBO types I believe I had (because you can’t test for that one in the UK), that is also a big driver of histamine intolerance and anxiety, and generally, people with H2S SIBO tend to be a lot sicker. And so I was treating myself for SIBO too and hoping that in doing so, my histamine mediated problems would reduce.
Around this time I also connected the mould dots as this was quite a large part of my SIBO training. Mould triggers histamine reactions in the body, and people who have conditions like SIBO, can often be more affected by mould because they body is already dealing with high levels of histamine and poor histamine clearance. And just as a side note, mould can also contribute to SIBO development and make it harder to treat too.
Now I talk about how I cleared the flat of as much mould as possible in another episode, so I’ll link to that in the show notes, but in short, I bought some natural mould and allergen sprays for the carpets, all of our clothes, surfaces, etc. I bought an air purifier and a dehumidifier, I threw out a bunch of stuff, changed lots of soft furnishings, etc, etc. Now you might be wondering why we didn’t just move. And trust me, we tried. At first we couldn’t because there was too much going on personally, Chris was still caring for his family and then we just needed some time to settle and recover from that experience. Then there were just multiple issues going on for us. We needed to save enough money for a rental deposit and all the costs involved in moving, which was challenging for us giving that we both were running young business in the middle of a pandemic. I couldn’t move during course deliveries as I needed to be around every week during the courses and they would go on for months, and then there was the development of the courses beforehand and the marketing, etc. and so there was about a year when I worked pretty much every day for 10-14 hours a day, which left no room for packing up the house or viewings, etc. And additionally, because we’re both self-employed and we both earn low incomes, finding a new flat that was affordable was difficult, and of course, if there was anyone else going up for the property we were applying for, they would always get it over us because most of the time they were not self-employed and would often earn more than our salaries combined. A few times we have been close to moving but then a stroke of weird bad luck would throw the situation and we ended up not moving after all. It’s been a whole thing and very strange and honestly sometimes I have wondered if we’re ever going to leave this place, and I PROMISE you, it has not been for lack of trying. The past few years have all been focused on trying to leave this flat!
So that’s a tangent, but basically, I have been trying to make the best of a bad situation in terms of the mould in the house and I will say, that even though there is water damage and clearly we just need to leave the flat, we really got on top of the mould situation to the best of our ability and my allergies have been so much better.
Then last year, things started to get bad again. I honestly can’t remember all the things that happened but I know the first occurrence was during my first course launch. I had accidentally eaten a high histamine food and I started having trouble breathing, chest pain, the works. I tried to leave it because I knew it was histamine mediated but every time I ate, I would get this recurrence of symptoms, so eventually, I tried to see my GP, but because of COVID and because it was breathing related, I was told to call an ambulance. So, I called an ambulance and the paramedics came out and were basically pretty pissed at me. They came about two hours after the call was made, and by this point, it had been about three hours since I had eaten and I had also taken some anti-histamines to try and get the reaction under control, and so I was feeling much better by the time they got out. So when they arrived, the fact that I was standing, able to talk, etc. had them automatically less concerned and I was asked why I even called them. When I explained the situation with the GP, they said that due to COVID, the GPs were basically off-loading patients onto paramedics in non-emergency situations and that next time I should insist on seeing them. My oxygen levels were good and my pulse was even, everything looked normal. They made me feel like I had wasted their time and had really burdened them, and I felt really patronised and small. I was of course, asked if I was anxious but by this point I was quite certain a lot of this was histamine driven so I told them about my observations and they noted it down as an allergic reaction and said I should get tested for allergies. They also told me that the GP surgery I was with was awful and that it was probably a waste of time going to see them, and to try and get in with a different surgery. The issues is that I do not fit into the catchment area for the other surgery, so I decided I would continue on the path of being mindful of histamines and really trying to clear the SIBO and get out of the house, so that my histamine problems could calm down.
From then on, a racing heart, palpitations, shortness of breath and dizziness were a daily occurrence for me, and I even almost fainted a few times. I knew that histamine can cause chest pain and a racing heart, heart palpitations, etc. so I just tried to get on with it and not see it as something to be super worried about, because clearly, the NHS weren’t.
Then around November last year, the chest pain started to creep back in. It was mild and sort of in the background, it was manageable, and I generally tend to eat more histamines in the winter – you know, cinnamon, warming spices, etc. so I put it down to that. But it felt okay, it wasn’t super bad and I had my eye on trying to go private, so I was trying to hold out for that.
My plan had been to take out insurance and see if I could get that covered. After completing my SIBO training, I spent much of last year beginning to believe that perhaps I had the trifecta of POTS, hypermobile-EDS and Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, which are all associated with SIBO and endometriosis but not really talked about or understood so much yet in the context of our community.
In case you’re not familiar with these conditions, I’ve linked to a couple of episodes where I discuss them and the endo and SIBO links in the show notes, as I’ve been researching and talking about these for a year now. But, let’s do a quick recap…
Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome is a group of 13 conditions which all affect connective tissue (collagen) in the body. Most are rare, but one type called hypermobility EDS is common. It causes hypermobility in the joints, but often that can be disguised in older patients as muscle stiffness, because the muscles tense up in an attempt to stabilise the body. Like endometriosis, EDS is often underdiagnosed, and most are diagnosed in their 30s and beyond.
I’m going to take you through some of the signs and symptoms of hyper-mobile EDS, now it’s worth noting here you do not need to have all of these and there is also a spectrum, for some, the symptoms are mild, for others they can be very severe:
Joint pain/full body pain
Hypermobility (can be very subtle and may be not at all depending on the stage of EDS, as the stiffness tends to get worse with age)
Stretchy skin
Soft, velvety skin
Excessive scar tissue growth
Bruise easily
Dislocations of joints
Chronic fatigue
Dental crowding
Muscle stiffness
IBS symptoms including bloating, constipation or diarrhoea
Heavy menstrual bleeding (33-75% have heavy menstrual bleeding)
Pain with sex (32-77% of those with EDS have vulvodynia and or pain with sex)
Painful periods (73-93% have painful periods)
Now Postural Tachycardia Syndrome or POTS is part of this trio of EDS-MCAS-PoTs I mentioned earlier. It is a type of dysautonomia, which is a group of conditions that affect the autonomic nervous system, which control involuntary functions of the body.
So POTS specifically affects blood flow and blood pressure in the body, so that too little blood is getting to the heart and the heart rate increases when going from sitting/lying down to standing, but it also has far reaching affects including on the gut.
So, some of the symptoms are…
Blood sugar dysregulation
Low blood pressure/fainting
Chest pain/breathing issues/palpitations/racing heart
Gut problems and bladder problems
Dizziness/balance difficulties/vertigo
Struggling to regulate temperature
And finally, let’s now look at Mast Cell Activation Syndrome or MCAS, for short. MCAS is when immune cells, called mast cells which release histamine, are overly sensitive and easily triggered, resulting in a higher amount of histamine being released on a daily basis.
Symptoms of course look a lot like histamine intolerance and can include:
· Sneezing
· Wheezing
· Runny or congested nose
· Red, itchy eyes
· Rashes, hives, itchy skin
· Racing heart or irregular heartbeat
· Chest tightness or chest pain
· Diarrhea
· Nausea
· Brain fog
· Irritability
· Food allergies and airborne allergies
· Bloating
· Puffy skin and swelling
· Painful periods/painful ovulation
· Migraines or headaches
Given that most of my clients have both SIBO and endometriosis, I had been seeing a lot of symptoms of these conditions and had started to weave together the pieces of my puzzle and my client’s too. I found a network of doctors who thankfully did understand this link and several of my clients were finally getting the diagnoses that they needed and were getting treated and feeling better and getting the answers they’ve been looking for all this time (and yes, I will link to the network in my show notes!).
Life was really manic so I had planned to go through all the health insurance investigations over Christmas and the New Year and ideally, I would then go and see this group of specialists. However, of course, Christmas Day happened.
On Christmas Day, I did my usual. I made pretty much everything from scratch, and made foods sugar free, gluten free and dairy free, but it’s pretty hard to have Christmas without histamine and so I probably had more histamine that day than I’ve had in maybe years. I felt fine during the day I think, maybe a few twinges here and there but nothing major, and then I was woken with that intense pain, which was the worst of all the chest pain I have ever experienced, truly, it was awful.
However, it had woke me from a deep sleep and so I wasn’t really full conscious. I gripped my heart and obviously was acutely aware of the pain in my arm and slight numbness, and I noticed I was asleep with my arm above my head, so in my weird half asleep state I thought to myself that I must have chest pain because my heart was struggling to pump blood to my arm which was above my head on the pillow. Of course, awake me realised too late that that’s not a good reason to have heart pain! The whole thing was weird because at the same time, I knew how serious it was because I lay back down next to Chris and put my fingernails on his back and told myself that if it happened again and I thought I was going to die, I would scratch him to wake him up, because I wasn’t sure I’d be able to talk through the pain. I also remember thinking I wouldn’t call the ambulance because they wouldn’t help me. If I had been more awake and thinking logically, I would have 100% gone to the hospital at that point and I really regret not having gone now.
The next day, the pain continued. It was never as bad as it was on Christmas night, but it was worse than it had ever been in the history of these symptoms. We went back and forth on whether to call an ambulance, but I kept hesitating because the most severe pain had been and gone and so I kept remembering what had happened the other times, when the doctors or paramedics had seen me after the worst of it and had dismissed me, and we also had a lot of COVID cases in my area, so I didn’t want to go to the hospital only to be dismissed and yet come back with COVID, and due to the rising COVID cases over Christmas, I also doubted they would take me seriously.
The symptoms continued and would be so bad that I’d fall over with pain. And I know, I know, I know I should have gone to the hospital. I am honestly embarrassed to say this, as a health coach, because let me tell you, if my client reported these symptoms to me I would tell them to get to A&E immediately, but I was so torn. I knew if I went to A&E that I wouldn’t get this covered on the insurance because it would be on my notes as a recent thing, and I was also pretty sure the A&E doctors wouldn’t know what was going on, wouldn’t run tests and would send me home telling me it was anxiety.
I want to be really clear about this. I know I should have gone to A&E, I absolutely know that and I regret it and I am telling every single one of you to go to the emergency services if you have symptoms like this, but I did not feel safe with the care providers around me. The paramedics, the GPS, the A&E staff had all dismissed me over the years and honestly, I resigned myself to thinking that if this was serious, if I was going to die, they weren’t going to help me and I would rather die at home with Chris, than being patronised and belittled in hospital and being told nothing was wrong with me. I even went so far as to tell Chris what to do with This EndoLife and my clients and course students if I had a heart attacked and died during this time, and because we’re not on great incomes, I was worried about what he’d do financially so also talked to him about what to do with my money and accounts.
Now of course, how did I go from trying to tell myself it was ‘just’ histamine to actually wondering if I was going to die? Well, firstly of course, the severity of the symptoms. Honestly, I truly felt like I might be about to have a major heart attack at any moment. Secondly, I started scouring the research to understand actually how histamine might be responsible for these symptoms. I knew chest pain was a symptom of histamine intolerance, but I didn’t know how. And unfortunately, I found what I was looking for. There are histamine receptors in the coronary arteries, and some research is indicating that high histamine levels can cause a type of angina when the arteries of the heart restrict and spasm, temporarily cutting off the blood supply to the heart.
So, in that sense, it’s almost like an allergic response resulting in angina, and for those of you not familiar with angina, it is heart pain that is caused by a lack of blood flow to the heart and is often caused by a blockage to the heart, so like a blocked artery. Now, the type I was looking into is more rare, and is caused by these spasms, and can occur when.. wait for it… Asleep or resting. And this was something Chris and I had really noticed, it didn’t matter if I was waking, exercising, sleeping or really relaxing on the sofa, I would get heart pain, and what’s typical with sort if ‘regular’ angina is that the pain should go away when resting, whereas mine wouldn’t. In fact, the only thing that would get my chest pain down, and it wasn’t even to a degree that was comfortable, just less terrifying, was high dose quercetin and honestly, too many anti-histamines, and interestingly enough, this type of angina responds well to medications that relax the spasms and that’s usually the treatment.
And so that’s sort of the end result, this type of angina caused by heart spasms, but the cause of that angina could be something called kuonis syndrome, which is defined as ‘the concurrence of acute coronary syndromes with conditions associated with mast cell activation’, and is nicked-named ‘allergic angina’ and unfortunately, it is not well recognised or understood, and tends to be missed and – which is what triggered my panic – can be very, very serious.
The other issue that had me on edge is that missing heart attacks and angina symptoms in women is very, very common. In fact, heart disease is the leading cause of death in women in the United States and until the past few years, was the leading of death for women in the UK, though it is still one of the leading causes.
The signs of heart attacks in women tends to vary a little from men, and because so much of our medical research and medical foundations are based on men, doctors are not as well versed in recognising the signs of heart disease in women; in fact, it took until the late 1990s for women to be properly included in research on heart disease and the BHF reports that in research, “women had a fifty per cent higher chance than men of receiving the wrong initial diagnosis following a heart attack.” Women are more likely to be dismissed as having a mental health issue like anxiety and in research, women with heart disease confirmed that one of the reasons they didn’t seek help sooner is that they were worried about being dismissed as a hypochondriac.
So, I attempted to get this all covered on insurance, and I even paid for a private GP appointment to get the referral, now he was happy to refer me but he did say he didn’t think it was heart related and what would I do if they investigated my heart and it was okay, and he was of course, very interested to ask about my anxiety. But anyway, I did get the referral, but unfortunately, turns out that I have been reporting these symptoms to my doctors since 2009 and so I couldn’t get it covered. So, I have been managing my symptoms with high dose quercetin and keeping what I think are my key triggers low, and it’s still been bad, and honestly up until I think it was March or April, it was truly, truly awful, but I needed to get a couple of hundred together to book an appointment with a private cardiologist who was specialised in POTS and MCAS, because my theory is that the MCAS is driving some form of allergic angina, and if it’s not that, then it’s potentially caused by POTS or at least in part.
So, I had my appointment back in April and I can tell you, even though he kept correcting me when I said ‘heart’ pain and would say it was ‘chest’ pain, he actually also, without me even suggesting it, said he believes that I could potentially have POTS-EDS-MCAS and possibly kuonis syndrome.
The trouble is, and this is what I’ve gone back and forth on myself, is that I don’t just get my dizziness and heart palpitations, etc. on standing, like people with POTS do, it comes randomly and it doesn’t get better when lying down. So, in some ways, I have many symptoms of POTS, but yet my symptoms don’t behave like typical POTS symptoms. The same goes for EDS. I have a lot of signs of EDS, but score low on the hypermobility spectrum – however, I will say that older patients with EDS tend to score low for hypermobility.
Interestingly enough, he did say that typical cardiologists are not familiar with kuonis syndrome and that there’s debate it even exists, and that even so, the treatment for this tends to be strong anti-histamines, so he has referred me to one of the three only MCAS specialists in the UK and also for an echocardiogram and stress echocardiogram, plus a POTS tilt table test as the first steps. From what I picked up on, I don’t think he expects to see much on the echocardiograms and also maybe doesn’t even think it’s my heart, but more so general chest pain from some sort of MCAS, but either way, I want to rule out any damage to my heart.
Because I’m going private and can’t get it covered, I am literally looking at £2500 for just these three tests alone and the follow up appointment, and that’s without the MCAS and EDS referrals, but it has to be done because the NHS just aren’t helping me. And this is a huge amount of money for me. In fact, we are going to be leaving here soon and hopefully travelling the UK for free with Trusted House Sitters, where we sit pets in return for somewhere to stay. It’s a bit like Airbnb but with cats and dogs and no fees, and it’s going to enable us to travel, which is an ultimate goal for us. But of course, for now, I need to stay in the UK for these tests, and I’m not going to lie, not paying rent and bills is going to dramatically improve my ability to pay for these tests!
Honestly, I am really nervous about these initial heart checks because I bought an at home ECG device and on a general basis, my heart looks fine, but I have never been able to catch a spasm in the moment it happens. My previous ECG in the doctor’s office looks fine, and if I have this type of allergic angina, I don’t know if they’ll see anything with a typical screening, or even, whether they know what to look for, if typical cardiologists don’t know what it is or believe it exists. The doctor who has referred me for these tests deals with POTS and is very, very well aware of MCAS and works with doctors within this sort of EDS-MCAS-POTS network, but I don’t think even he is versed in this allergic angina, so I am still not confident it will be correctly identified or safely ruled out. But at least I am going in the right direction and am seeing someone who, for the first time, agrees with me, and takes me seriously.
Now I really wanted to raise this and share my story today, because when I saw this doctor, Dr. Gall, he said the majority of his patients, are like me. He said he sees something like 70 patients a week who are young women, with endometriosis, interstitial cystitis, SIBO and report dizziness, allergic/histamine reactions, palpitations, chest pain, all the symptoms I’ve reported. And I just don’t know why we aren’t talking about this more.
I see so, so many clients with signs and symptoms of MCAS, POTS and EDS, and this connection between these conditions and endometriosis and SIBO are just not widely known, and so people go around living with these other illnesses which can be managed and just feel so unwell, and like they’re going crazy.
And I know, from talking to some of my students and you all, that I’m not the only one having heart (or chest!) pain, and I don’t want this to be an alarmist episode, I really don’t. I really work hard to pull my clients out of that health spiral where they, you know, end up imagining the worst case scenario, so if you have symptoms like me, I don’t want you to leave this episode thinking you have some sort of angina, but I do want you to do not do what I did, and be fobbed off for decades. I want you to push and push to get the right heart checks, because we are so often dismissed and this is serious. Yes, it might not be your heart, but no one else is talking about this stuff, and so it would be a disservice to you if I didn’t. And of course, if you have chest pain, please, please, please contact emergency services.
So that’s it. My ECGs are booked in and I’ll be having those soon, and when I have enough of an update I’ll share where I am at next. I really hope this episode is helpful and not scary. Please try not to spiral, because look, I’m still here, I didn’t die, as far as I know, I didn’t have a heart attack (I don’t think) and I’m okay, so that’s all good, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t serious and doesn’t need talking about, which is why I’m sharing today.
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Show notes
Podcast episodes
https://www.theendobellycoach.com/podcast/endometriosis-and-ehlers-danlos-syndrome?rq=postural
Angina
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/angina/
https://www.heart.org/en/health-topics/heart-attack/angina-chest-pain
https://www.heart.org/en/health-topics/heart-attack/angina-chest-pain/prinzmetals-or-prinzmetal-angina-variant-angina-and-angina-inversa
Kounis syndrome
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22050066/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4462222/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6636655/
https://cdt.amegroups.com/article/view/1609/2259
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/cclm-2016-0010/html?lang=en
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6791094/
Women and heart disease
https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-magazine/medical/women/misdiagnosis-of-heart-attacks-in-women
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/causesofdeath/articles/leadingcausesofdeathuk/2001to2018
https://www.henryford.com/blog/2017/04/women-ignore-signs-heart-attack
https://mcpress.mayoclinic.org/women-health/part-1-heart-disease-in-women-unsuspected-overlooked-ignored/
https://www.cdc.gov/healthequity/features/heartdisease/index.html