Aa
chest pain
Hi. I am a 19 yr old female. use to smoke for quite a few years and drink at parties and stuff.. eat a lot of fast food and stuff.. though this yr i have stopped doing all that stuff, besides eat fast good and i do drink on occasion. but I am slender and fit, spend most of my time outside, and get up to 5 hrs of exercise a day. but for the last couple yrs have had on and off chest pain.. feeling of tightness and hard to breath, last for a minute or so. then about 3 weeks ago had major chest pain... pretty much felt crippling. the pain went to my left arm, and my arm went completely numb plus my fingers were all tingly and stuff..the pain in my chest lasted for about 2 hrs after that.. got really tired and went to bed with it still hurting. then a week after i had chest pain and it went up my left side of my neck and down my left arm. the pain lasted for a couple minutes then went away. my dad just just had a heart attack so i am worried that there might be some kind of family history of heart disease. I went to my doc and they said that it was heart palpitations (even though i never noticed my heart skip a beat).. anyways i am going to do this 24 hr heart monitoring thing in a couple of weeks.. but I don't think this will help diagnose me because my chest pain doesn't happen on a regular occurrence. Is there any other kind of test that I can do that will better diagnose me or is the heart monitor a good first step?
As I'm sure you are aware, the key here is to catch the symptoms when present. If there are no symptoms when any tests are performed, it is likely nothing will be spotted. I'm sure you have told your Doctor an approximation of how often they occur, and if you feel that 24hrs is insufficient, then you could ask for a longer period of time, or a different test. One such test which might induce your condition is a stress ultrasound. They chemically induce the heart to work harder while continually monitoring you and looking at images of your heart. However, this is also likely not to show anything if the symptoms don't appear. If your heart is stressed and no problems occur, then it wouldn't really leave many options for exploration though.
I think a good first step would be the portable heart monitor, and if it doesn't show anything, or you don't get symptoms, don't let them give up.
I think a good first step would be the portable heart monitor, and if it doesn't show anything, or you don't get symptoms, don't let them give up.
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