Chest Pain

Tweet

I have multiple conditions which each cause chest pain. First (and possibly the worst) is costochondritis, or inflammation of my ribs. I have had this for a year now (it is only supposed to last a couple months at most) and when it flares up it feels like I'm having a heart attack. My worst trigger point is on the left side of my sternum, right about where my heart is. I've been to the ER so many times over this, have had all the tests to rule out heart problems, and am currently seeing a cardiologist who doesn't believe the pain is cardiac related. Still, it is unnerving to feel like you're having a heart attack nearly every day! It worries me that if I ever do have a heart attack, I will write it off as being costo and not get help. Then I have GERD (Gastroesophageal reflux disease), which is also pretty bad at times. It can also mimic a heart attack. It doesn't always present as regular heartburn (where you feel acid rising up in your throat,) so sometimes it's hard to tell that the pain I'm feeling is due to GERD. But over the years I've come to recognize when it's GERD and when it's not. I also apparently have a hiatal hernia, which my doctors aren't really concerned about. My dad also has this and I know it has caused him a lot of grief. I guess this type of hernia is common. A hiatal hernia is where there's a rip in your diaphragm and the stomach slips up into the chest cavity. It can become dangerous, even fatal, if your stomach gets trapped there and the blood supply gets cut off. Fortunately it is rare for that to happen, but it's still a bit unnerving knowing it could. On top of all this, I have anxiety, which also causes chest pain and can make you feel like you're having a heart attack. Which in turn worsens the anxiety, and also worsens the costochondritis symptoms as anxiety seems to be a trigger for costo for some reason, probably due to changes in the way you breathe. The last few days my chest pain has been pretty horrible, to the point that it's making it hard for me to sleep. I remember life before I had any chest pain and I miss those days. This Tuesday it will be a year exactly since I had an onset of costochondritis and all these other weird symptoms started happening (which I still have no official diagnosis for.) Usually when costo is chronic it's a symptom of some type of autoimmune disease, like fibromyalgia or rheumatoid arthritis (I know I don't have RA; that's already been ruled out.) It's been a challenge accepting this as my "new normal," but I don't really have a choice in the matter. I wish the pain would settle down so I could at least sleep. It always makes me nervous when I have bad chest pain -- even though I know my heart is fine, I always worry that there's something wrong with it.