Chest tightness, then arm numbness.

[f4rph33r]

Hello I'm a 26 year old male, Today I had some really strange things happen to me, my chest felt really tight like it was hard to breathe, and I had this pain in my left chest/side, Kind of under my armpit. I laid down for a little while and kept changing my sides to see if it would go away. Now the feeling has gone away but in my left bicep I have this feeling like there's a elastic tied around it. sometimes my fingers tingle, my back of my upper arm  seems really warm as well. I read around that sometimes back injury can cause strange nerve reactions as I have a lower back injury.  Is this typical of a blood clot?

[Dr. Kokil Mathur]

Hi
Welcome to the forum!
Well a low back injury cannot cause symptoms in the upper part of the body, except when a clot travels up and blocks a blood vessel. Usually the symptoms are below the level of the injury.
As SurgiMenopause mentions, you must rule out angina or heart attack by a 12 lead EKG first, maybe if not at the doctor’s then at an ER. The other possibility of such a pain is gastric reflux or GERD. At times costochondritis (inflammation of the joint between chest bone and ribs) too behaves this way. Do discuss this with your doctor and get yourself examined.
Hope this helps. Please let me know if there is any thing else and do keep me posted. Take care!

[LivingInHope]

I believe you should go to the ER and make sure you did not just experience a heart attack.   It can make you short of breath, give you pain in your shoulder and chest, as you may know as well as affect your hand. You probably have heard they can happen even to young people, and it is better to be checked out than not about something so serious.    If it's something else, hopefully, the doctor at the ER will try to assist you with what that might be.  Blood clots are also potentially life threatening, so with the warmth in your arm, it is best to go to the ER and get it checked out because if a clot breaks loose, it can potentially go to your lung or heart, etc.!