So, I've been having cardiac symptoms for some time now. Palpitations, sometimes accompanied by chest pain, randomly feeling like my heart disappeared while feeling woozy and short of breath before my heart suddenly flops and starts pounding, racing heartbeat, low bp, narrow pulse pressure, all that fun stuff.
I had been put on a beta blocker (Inderal, standard, not extended) for my Chiari Malformation to try to help the migraines, and at first it helped the narrowing of my pulse pressure, but a few months afterwards, the rest of the cardiac symptoms including what my doctor called presyncopic events began to appear. He refered me to a cardiologist, but thanks to a 10 day long migraine, I had to reschedule, and I won't see him until July.
My symptoms continued to worsen; shortness of breath with any physical activity including walking, the palpitations became more severe and frequent, and inevitably I wound up in the ER when I couldn't get my breath back and my heart was both racing and skipping beats.
They ran tests, did an EKG, gave me fluids, etc. EKG showed a probable enlarged atrium, well that's good news. But that aside everything was normal.
Followed up with my GP and he put me on extended release Inderal, which effectively doubled my dose as well. Since then, the palpitations have lessened significantly, but I still get extremely weak and short of breath when I'm standing, I still get light headed when I stand up from a seated or lying position, and changing from sitting to lying down or vice versa still makes my heart palpitate a little and winds me a bit.
All in all, I don't know if this is POTS or the Chiari (which my doctor thinks is a probability). I don't know what sort of testing is even done for POTS and how it's diagnosed.
If anyone has any information, educated opinions, insight, etc, please feel free to comment. I'm at a loss at this point.
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