Worried about extreme tightness in chest during day

Hang Fire wrote:

PoolQ wrote: I walked in. I asked the Doctor. He said your going in.

If you are going to write something like this, you should state what symptoms and signs you had and what you asked the doctor. Otherwise, your post is of little value.

PoolQ wrote:No one should ever have unnecessary procedures.

That I agree with.

When The New York Times reported Tuesday that doctors at HCA Health Care hospitals in Florida might have performed cardiac procedures on patients who didn't need them, it raised questions about the risks of such unnecessary surgery.

ABCNews.com's Medical Unit breaks down the risks of such procedures for you, step by step:

Cardiac Catheterization

Since cardiac catheterization is a diagnostic test, doctors tend to disagree about when it is necessary to subject patients to it. As such, this area is a bit more "gray" than unnecessary stents, doctors told ABCNews.com.

"If you have a massive heart attack, almost everyone would agree you should undergo cardiac catheterization," Dr. Deepak Bhatt, who directs the Integrated Interventional Cardiovascular Program at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, told ABCNews.com. "That's one end of the spectrum where really there's little room for debate."

On the other end, there are symptom-free patients who perhaps have abnormal stress-test results. Or maybe they're having chest pains in the emergency room but are only experiencing indigestion. Either way, they're told they need the test.

"How does a patient, when they're having a heart attack, say, 'I don't think so?'" Dr. Mark Adelman, the chief of Vascular Surgery at NYU Langone Medical Center, asked ABCNews.com.

When a patient undergoes cardiac catheterization, a wire tube, or sheath, is inserted into the arteries in the patient's groin or wrist area (femoral or radial arteries). The sheath carries equipment up to the heart, but before it can get there, the patient faces an initial set of risks:

Bleeding from the artery in the groin or wrist

Blood clot in the arm or leg, which could cause the patient to lose a limb

Bleeding into the belly (if the artery near the groin is punctured too high)

"Any of those can be life-threatening problems," Adelman told ABCNews.com. "Those are the local complications."

Next, the doctors thread the sheath up the artery toward the heart, resulting in the second set of risks:

Sheath disrupts plaque in the arteries, causing a clot

Equipment punctures artery walls

Stents

Once doctors have threaded their equipment inside the body, they can choose whether to insert a stent, which is a metal mesh tube that works with a balloon to expand and open up a narrow artery. If a stent is inserted, the patient faces another set of immediate risks:

Equipment disrupts plaque in coronary artery, clogging a blood vessel and blocking oxygen from the heart

Stent punctures coronary artery

Regardless of whether a stent is necessary, Bhatt said one or two out of every 100 patients undergoing stent surgery experiences major complications, such as heart attack or stroke, even death. He said the risk is higher in people who have heart disease, but even for patients who don't need stents, the risk isn't "zero."

Bhatt said there's less than a 1 percent chance a patient would experience complications from plaque breaking off and traveling downstream in the same artery to cause a heart attack.

Once patients makes it through stent surgery, they also face long-term risks as the body reacts to the foreign object.

Stents can develop blood clot

Stents accumulate scar tissue over a period of months

The blood clot risk is rare at this stage, however, occurring less than 1 percent of the time, Bhatt said.

"When it does happen, it can result in a heart attack," he said. "One minute the stent is open, and in less than a minute, it's closed."

Less than 10 percent of patients now develop scar tissue in stents -- before 2003, when stent technology was less developed, the risk was greater.

https://www.google.com/search?q=unneces ... 8&oe=utf-8

cancun wrote:

ada wrote:Thank you for your concern...but I feel more concerned that PAP is doing something weird to my breathing
(Maybe I should have mentioned this before)....
but I have felt this before occasionally, and when I mentioned this sensation to a doctor in April, they did one of those breathing tests on me ...and diagnosed me with mild asthma
I did mention the concern of my heart (esp after just being diagnosed with a sleep breathing disorder), but they did a heart test and a chest xray , and said they both came back normal
I just took my pulse and it is normal.

While it is good that you were checked in April that that was almost four months ago. I wore a heart monitor for a month and had a stress test and an echo test and EKG and all showed my heart was in great shape and a month later I had a heart attack spent nine days in ICU and had stents put in. Better safe than sorry.

chunkyfrog wrote:There is no one set of symptoms for heart attack.
Some are more common than others, and lazy "physicians" often only go after the low-hanging fruit.
{{{maybe YOU are too difficult for their above and beyond!}}}
I wish every doctor were as driven and curious as the ones on TV,
but real life is not so well-arranged.
Behind the mask, you may find Frank Burns or Dr. House.
Now think about all the dips you knew in school. Yeah, that's what I mean.

BlackSpinner wrote:

Susie Kay wrote:I haven't been here very long, but I have read a lot of posts, both new ones and old ones. There are many new CPAPers who report chest pains in the beginning. I never read that any one of these was having a heart attack.

If you go along without chest pains and then you start CPAP and have chest pains, then why be scared of a heart attack?

!

That is very bad advice, we do not give that kind of advice on this forum. ALWAYS check out chest pains ALWAYS. Heart attacks can happen to anyone, anywhere, anytime. A healthy 32 year old coworker died at a pool party from a heart attack in front of his kids.

PoolQ wrote:A couple of weeks before I first met with a sleep doc, I went to the ER with trouble breathing (this is what later caused me to seek out a sleep doc). They took an xray, put an O2 monitor on my finger and waited (oh and blood work) then they discharged me with a shrug, nothing said about sleep apnea. They billed insurance $4,000 for nothing.

n0hardmask wrote:I've had 2 stress tests in past 10 years, then WHAM, I have a big heart attack the earned me two stints and 8 days in the hospital

cancun wrote:I wore a heart monitor for a month and had a stress test and an echo test and EKG and all showed my heart was in great shape and a month later I had a heart attack spent nine days in ICU and had stents put in.

Krelvin wrote:SEE A DOCTOR!

babypenguini wrote:Your chest hurts. Fix--time. Since I hadn't really been breathing at night and it takes different muscles to breathe lying down, my chest hurt for the first couple of weeks. Nothing to do about it but maybe some deep breathing while lying down for a couple weeks.

viewtopic/t106911/Side-effects-I-wish-I ... arted.html

Julie wrote:then go back and forth

chunkyfrog wrote:"It is always better to err on the side of caution."

chunkyfrog wrote:Meaning our alternating contradictory advice is not helpful.
"It is always better to err on the side of caution."
A false alarm is a much better outcome than a corpse.

Julie wrote:she should FIRST see her MD, then go back and forth re Cpap etc. once she's been cleared.

ada wrote:Thank you all
I will mention it to the doctor tomorrow (Monday) ...and get it checked out again

cancun wrote:since anecdotes are considered amusing I do not consider my response to be an anecdote