meepa

Preface: I am an otherwise healthy male in his mid-20s.

Okay so one day I wake up from a nap. Shortly thereafter I experience a sensation like I can't breathe in all the way. Unsettling. I go to the toilet and bend over in case I ate something weird and need to chuck. I feel quite woozy and then pass out (at which point my girlfriend says I wheeze heavily like I'm gasping for breath). 10ish seconds later I wake up and, apart from the typical post-faint light-headedness, I feel fine.

The rest of the evening goes about pretty normally, albeit with some nausea. I chalk it up to dehydration or something and don't really worry about it. The next day I experience chest pains. They are difficult to explain. At best it's sort of like a "pressure" in the upper-chest area. Naturally this freaked me out and I then began to display all kinds of signs of anxiety (tingling in the extremities, hyperventilation, etc). I went to the doctor and she said "who knows" what caused the fainting. Had an EKG performed which did not show anything terribly exciting except for a slight abnormality that is statistically common. She refers me to a cardiologist just in case.

I see the cardiologist and he briefly checks me out. He thinks it is nothing and assumes it was stress related. I say fine and leave. A week later, these chest pains persist. I don't have them 24-7 but it seems as if I have them the majority of my waking hours (it doesn't impair my sleep). I would rate it very low on a "pain" scale; it is more of a discomfort.

So I see another doctor and he suggests it's some kind of acid-reflux. Now I am suspicious of this because I have never had any kind of symptoms before, and it doesn't seem to happen by way of eating. He says perhaps some acid got lost in my esophagus and caused corrosion when I fainted, who knows. So I take a month's supply of a medication that is supposed to fight against GERD (acid-reflux).

I honestly can't tell if it helped that much. It is a month and a half later and I still get the feeling in my chest (typically in the center, sometimes migrated around the left breast area). Out of serious paranoia I took the doc's advice and had an echocardiogram performed. They say it checked out fine.

I got another month's supply of the anti-reflux meds which I'm still taking. They seem to think that it is not cardiac related, which is nice but who ever knows for sure. Some of my family thinks it is stress related, and I will admit it seems to get worse when I am stressed out, but I cannot tell if stress IS the problem, or just worsens the problem. All I can say is I have certainly been under a lot more stress since this has occurred because chest pains are scary.

I have read up a lot on GERD, including the long thread here in the TFP. Really the only symptom that I appear to show is "non-cardiac chest pain" which doesn't help me a whole lot.

If anybody has had any experience with something like this or has any bright ideas, I'd be happy to hear about it. Thanks.