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Gallstones, Heart, Something Else?

Hi all,

I have doctors looking at this but just wanted to see if I might be missing something.

A couple of weeks ago I had an attack of something when I laid down for bed.  Pain was right side (front), under right rib (near gallbladder), just below sternum (felt like sawing), back pain center of back and out.  Took some naproxen, didn't feel like a heart attack (might have been but EKG a couple of days later seems to have been normal).  It stayed around for 2 days then lightened up and I stopped the naproxen and started with the doctors.

I do have an endoscopy / colonscopy (apparently I'm overdue by a few months) scheduled.

The thing that bothers me the most (but doctors don't seem to care much about) is that there is a tightness under the ribs when I exercise.  I've had this for a year plus and kind of just put it off as stress / anxiety.  I was not long ago doing 5.5 mile run / walks up and down hills and now short walks tighten this area up.  I can walk about a mile before it tightens up.  

On Sunday, I got on the exercise bike (3 sets, relatively short) everything kind of hurt.  I was also having PVC's like crazy and fairly strong as the pain built up.  Pain, which leads to stress, was possibly triggering them.  And now the weird part, about 3:00 I had a bowl of cabbage, and a naproxen.  At 5:00 things normalized, the PVC's stopped and the pain lightened a lot (naproxen takes awhile to kick in so maybe that).

The GI didn't think gallstones after the ultrasound, and labs, but we'll know more next week after the fun time.  The GP/Internist/Cardiologist (not board certified) didn't seem too worried about a heart attack.

I just know, not fun....  At least it's easy to talk to a doctor right now.
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Avatar universal
Don't rule out you tweaked something exercising.  If you do ab work that area can get strained.  I have a chronic problem right about there, goes nuts when I yawn of all things.  Never underestimate the power of exercise to tweak things.  Sometimes we can do it just by bending over and picking something up.  
The human body is really quite fragile.  I hope it isn't something more serious, but try this:  press on that area and see if it causes the pain you're experiencing.  Then, if your docs don't find something wrong, it's likely to be a tweak that needs some TLC so it can heal.
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I don't know, that was actually my first thought, back tweak.  But after a couple of weeks with this off and on-going, well, it doesn't feel like any injury I've had before.  It's just not localized enough.  Honestly, the closest symptoms I've found are MS hug (doesn't really fit but it comes up when I search), gallbladder upper GI (which seems less likely based on the next paragraph) and some weird heart issue or blockage but I don't have any heart symptoms other than the tightness and back pain.  The PVC's bother me but they trigger on stress so they're going to be worse with something like this.

But all I'm doing is typing symptoms into Google looking for something that makes sense and gallbladder pain maps are the closest thing I've seen.

I got the ultrasound results and there were some polyps or gallstones in the gallbladder (they didn't seem sure which) but while they don't seem small to me, the size is below what I've read is likely to be cancerous.  Basically, the ultrasound while not perfect doesn't point towards anything.  Pancreas was OK, liver maybe a bit rough (genetic, I don't drink, well not since college and maybe too much Cola in my past).

Frustrating, and I'm gonna get double-dipped on Tuesday which should, well, eliminate two places of potential problems.
Leave the Google machine alone, it will drive you nuts.  You can't really Google symptoms, the same symptoms can be a sign of a million different conditions or no condition at all, just life.  Google is fine for when you get a diagnosis and a treatment plan and you want to make sure it sounds right, or when treatment isn't working and you want to see if your doc is a quack or not.  But you just can't Google symptoms, it'll terrify you and probably not edify you.  Hope you find your fix.
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