Has surgery been discussed?
have your family members also been given EKGs and Echoes? Does anyone else in your family have HCM? The worst thing you can do is to stress out over this, even though it may be hard for you at this point. Believe it or not, the absolute worst time to be diagnosed with HCM is actually in childhood before the growth spurts of the teen years because the heart muscle thickens very quickly during those growing years. A lot of patients don't even know they have the disease until they are in their 50's and 60's. In the scale of things, HCM is pretty young....it first started being seen, I believe, in the 1960. At this point, there is a lot more things that can be done to help you. When you stress out, catecholamines are released into the blood stream....that's to help you run or fight from any threat. That can cause more problems with the heart's electrical system so you can get arrhythmias, or irregular heart beats. ALL people have premature beats, that NORMAL. Those beats are the normal "back-up" system of the heart. The premature beats are of concern based on type and where they originate in the heart. Follow the advice of your cardiologist and don't just "live" on MedHelp looking for advice. My daughter, Kristy had (what we thought for most her life) was Concentric Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy; all the walls of both ventricles were thickened to the point where she didn't have much chambers left. She also had several different electrical problems with the upper and lower chambers of her heart as well; she was first diagnosed at 6 years of age, by twelve she was having heart attacks because the walls were so thick, the blood supply was cut off to the muscle. She received her first heart transplant at 22 years of age and she died while awaiting a second heart and kidney. It turned out that she didn't have HCM at all but an extremely RARE form of Glycogen Storage Disease only known as PRKAG2; it is too rare to have given a name. Take care