right access deviation

[jingles5]

My 19 year old daughter hasn't been feeling well for a couple weeks. We went to the Dr on Monday, they took a bunch of blood & urine samples & did an EKG which when they read it showed "right access deviation".  My daughter's symptoms are....pain in her back & sides, chest pain, nausea, diarrhea, shooting pains & numbness down her arms & legs, headaches, fever, & every time she eats she gets pains in the left side of her stomach & feels sick to her stomach. She also passed out on Sunday night. She is in the early stages of lupus & the Dr feels a lot of those symptoms are due to the lupus but I am really worried now that they saw the right access deviation.  Any ideas?

[jingles5]

I don't know what her heart rate is & they didn't tell me how severe they just told she needs to see a cardiologist.

[is_something_wrong]

You probably mean "Right axis deviation". (RAD)

RAD means that electrical forces in the heart goes towards right, rather than left, which is most common, because the left chambers of the heart contains more muscle mass than the right (after all, the left chambers are responsible for pumping blood around the body, while the right chambers are only responsible for pumping blood into the lungs for oxygenation).

There are lots of reasons for RAD. In young people it can be a completely normal finding (as young people often have more rightwards electrical axis than older, because with increased blood pressure (with age) the left heart chamber tends to grow). It can be caused by a rapid heart rate (the electrical axis goes towards right when heart rate increases above 100 and towards 130 - then it for some reason turn left again if the heart rate is even higher). But it can also be caused by increased work load on the right heart chamber, like high pressure in the pulmonary arteries, pulmonal disease, or a blood clot.

How rapid was her heart rate? And more important, how severe was the RAD? Slight RAD can, as mentioned, be completely normal.