Here is my history, for any and all who care to read and respond. I hope there are a lot of you.
I'm a male, 27 years old, about 5'11 and 135 (on the low end) to 145 (on the high end), depending on my weight variances - a pretty skinny guy. I also have a moderate case of pectus excavatum (funnel chest), but I've had it my whole life - I've always been a runner - and it has never caused me any issues. The doctor's now tell me that it doesn't cause me any issues, and I recognize that I am simply hyper aware of it these days.
I would love to say that all my symptoms are anxiety related, because I have a huge trigger - I've had a very stressful marriage that came to a head when my wife moved out last December (2012). In January 2013, I started having some slight symptoms of being on edge, difficulty swallowing and "missing a breath" from time to time. I'd go to swallow, and not be able to - it would send me into a panic, and I would have to concentrate on that next swallow. This was never with food - it was just swallowing for the sake of swallowing. It was bearable at that point, until one fateful night in June 2013...
I awoke in the middle of the night gasping for breath with my heart racing. I'm 27 years old, but I called my mom, because I had no clue what else to do. I thought that I was going to die right there on my floor in the middle of the night by myself. Somehow, after talking for an hour or two and praying, I was able to get back to sleep. But nothing since that day has been the same.
Two days later, at a friend's birthday party - I completely fell apart. Chest was tight and pounding at the same time. I was shaking, sweating, feeling like everything was about to end, but I somehow got through it. It's now October, and these last four months have been the worst of my life, and I don't see a sign of them stopping.
I've been to the doctor. I've had a chest x-ray, two or three EKG's, an echocardiogram, I've worn a heart monitor - all of these things have come back clean. When leaving my cardiologist the last time about two months ago, his words to me were "Feel good about your heart". I only wish that I could. I'll just have pain in my chest all the time! It's almost always on the right hand side, which I have been thankful for that it is opposite of my heart, but even just today, I've started feeling some more on the left hand side, which just scares me.
I'm a very factual person, so the most frustrating thing is that even though the signs point to anxiety (and I have a good reason for it) and the doctors haven't found anything wrong, I still can't kick any of these physical symptoms! How is this possible? I don't have many "panic attacks" per say - I simply just don't feel good on a day to day basis. I'll just be checking my pulse all the time, even when I try not to (it sometimes gets up there close to 100 even when nothing stressful is going on, but it'll usually hover around 80 or so, and sometimes even less). I just always want to go to the doctor and get checked out. I wish that I had a cardiologist at work that, once or twice a day, I could just go to the back and have him hook me up and do an EKG so I could see how everything was. Another strange symptom is my burping. I'm not a guy who ever used to burp just "for the heck of it" or anything else, but now I feel as though I'll just many times have a pressure in my chest, and burping will be easy for me to do, or on the opposite end, be very hard for me to do, and I have to try to drink water in order to burp to help get rid of the pressure. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't.
I'm not sleeping well either. I'm terrible at staying in a house by myself, for fear that I'm going to have some sort of medical emergency, that the pain in my chest or the tightness in my throat is going to flare up, and that's just going to be that - and they'll find me the next day on the floor when I don't come into work.
I don't really think these things are going to happen - it would be surprising to me if they did! But I can't shake the feeling that something else is wrong. I'm really trying to stay away from daily medication, but I'm open to it now at this point, just because I want to feel better. The doctor did give me 2-mg pills of valium, which I know is an extremely low dose, that I can take on a case-by-case basis whenever I feel like it. I think they help sometimes, but other times i'm not so sure.
The divorce also isn't over - it will be in about two months. I'd like to think that once it gets taken care of (it wasn't a mutual decision either - I didn't want one, but she did - but even with that being said, we don't have lawyers...it's not hard "legally" for us to take care of), that some of these symptoms will go away. I just hope I make it until then, and something doesn't happen to me.
Bottom line: I just walk around every day thinking, "I wonder if this is the day that something is going to happen to me. I wonder if this is the day that the pain in my chest will flare up even more and I'll have to think, "This is it - this is the moment that I've been dreading that I always knew was going to happen", and then it'll all be over. I'll be walking around and all of the sudden I'll go to take the next breath, and it just won't be there, and as I gasp for breath, I'll be thinking the same thing - "I can't believe it, this is the end - I can't breathe".
I just want to feel normal again. This may sound cocky, but I know I'm a good person who could threat someone right, and I just feel as though I'm never going to have the opportunity to have a wife, kids, a "normal life", because death is going to find me before I ever have the chance.