What the Health?

At 6 a.m. on a Saturday, my day to sleep in, I was abruptly awakened while mid dream with a sharp pain in my heart. I was confused. I had not felt anything like this before, and then here it came again, this is when I knew this was real, this was happening. For one second I thought, "that's strange nothing to worry about", but then when it happened again and again the pain had my attention. I immediately tried to make sense of the feeling and assess what needed to happen. Did I need to go to the hospital? Did I need to tell my husband in case something worse was coming? Should I just wait and see? The pain stopped. I sat in bed confused and scared. Would this happen again? Was this just a freak occurrence? That's when it hit me, I am 41. I have had friends younger than me and around my same age that died with heart issues. This is something I could not let go and move about my day like nothing happened, so I told my husband and we decided together at minimum I would go to the urgent care. I was reluctant to do anything because after all, the pain had stopped and only lasted a few minutes and I knew going to any medical office saying I woke up with heart pain was for sure going to result in a very long day and a possible large bill. The only thing that got me to go that day was because I know that heart attacks in women can start weeks before they actually turn into a full blown attack, this and the thought of friends that had suffered the worst fate in the prime of their lives moved me to show up for my body. After sitting at the urgent care and having a good AKG reading my nerves were calmed but I was not totally out of the woods yet, the doctor advised me to go to my regular doctor on Monday to get blood work and get a heart calcium score. As many of you know that have had any extensive medical issue this starts a process, a very long process beginning with appointments, tests, and guess work. Fortunately, after taking all the heart tests available and getting CT scans done on my back my doctors finally came to the conclusion that it was in fact a skeletal issue that I'm used to dealing with but causing a new symptom in this case imitating a heart episode. Over the years I've had my share of medical stuff and in this case it turns out I got the best news possible but why I decided to write about this experience is because I know that we become complacent where our health is concerned. If we've had past medical issues it's easy to shy away from finding anything else wrong because we know what an inconvenience that could be to our lifestyle. Sometimes its money that comes between us and our health. Medical care even with good insurance is expensive, and sometimes its just because we think, "surely not me". In my case this was part of it because although I've had many other things occur with my health I have never had any issues with my heart or any history of heart issues in my family, and I of course immediately googled if I was at high risk and most of the information I found agreed with my thoughts except one, I was a woman

over 40. "Whoops", totally forgot about that! Yep there it was "over 40", I qualified as being in a higher risk category (not at high risk but higher). Sometimes we need to be reminded even with our bodies to see ourselves as we truly are. Lastly, I think as you grow in age you realize that health is no longer a vanity project but a choice to be made to assist your spiritual growth and if your spiritual growth is not a destination but a journey, so is your physical health.

~Jill~