Chest Pain

Monday, 25 October 2010 13:51
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Arachnoiditis has thrown me another curved ball this past week or so: chest pain.

I’ve had lots of different chest pains over the past few years and managed to explain most of them to myself anatomically/physiologically but this one had me flummoxed and forced to temporarily suspend my identity as a person and become a patient in A&E.

My previous chest pains have included sharp knife like ones with chest infections (pleuritic), shooting ones which prevented me taking reasonable breath (neuralgic related to thoracic spine), burning after shingles,  inflammatory breast pain (mastalgia) and pain from tablets getting ‘stuck’ (towards the back of my chest). This new one is really very odd, comes on as a sort of gripping in my left chest, when I pee.

So, as I always advise people to get new persistent pain checked out, when it came on at 03.20 last Tuesday and was still there by 0900, I went to get checked out. No, it isn’t cardiac, my ECG and blood tests are fine. My GP reckons it’s gastric, as I have a history of stomach ulcer so I am now on omeprazole, but to be frank I am not convinced
that is what is going on.

The best idea I can come up with is that my neurogenic bladder/bowel are throwing up this odd pain and so it is just another arach. oddity.

The irony of last Tuesday was I was meant to be lecturing junior doctors on Medically Unexplained Symptoms (MUS) and there I was with my very own MUS. I think the A&E staff reckoned that I am simply a nutty shrink!