Hi all, I've been having a symptom which I think is covid related but I might be wrong. I am a 5'5 120 lb 23 year old female (sedentary until last few weeks) and I had covid just about a year ago. I had some long covid symptoms including prolonged shortness of breath (which became worse with environmental stressors and improved with flonase) and very odd taste and smell for awhile, but these have subsided.
I'm unsure if this is related, but in late November of last year I started to have a stabbing pain in the left side of my chest. It started very faint 1/10 on the pain scale for maybe 10 seconds and grew to a peak in late December, being an 8/10 in one instance and lasting for hours. It appears in slightly different areas around or under my left breast. It's been accompanied by a litany of other symptoms which I believe are probably anxiety induced such as numbness/tingling in my left arm and dizziness.
I went to the ER at one point where I had blood work, a chest x-ray, and an EKG done, and sent home with a note about tachycardia but otherwise nothing. I started on a low dose of atenolol. I wore a heart monitor for a month, had more EKGs, had an echocardiogram. Nothing came back abnormal. Eventually I stopped taking the atenolol as I had a very low heart rate and very low blood pressure on it. I tried taking tylenol on a doctor's orders to reduce inflammation but it didn't seem to help.
I just saw a pulmonologist for a consult who was mostly unconcerned but was interested in getting a lung function test. I also just had my blood drawn to test my thyroid, as my mom had terrible hypothyroidism. There's not really any history of heart disease in my family besides an aunt having an arrhythmia.
The chest pain just never went away really. It appears maybe once a day at a low intensity for anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes or so. Sometime's it's worse and sometimes better. I can't really track down a pattern, although in all fairness I'm very scattered :) It doesn't accompany panic attacks or lots of stress. Sometimes I think something is wrong with my heart as my diastolic bp is always very low, 55-60. Sometimes it feels like my heart flops or skips a beat, but they didn't see anything on the heart monitor. Maybe it's because I was on atenolol? Sometimes I feel like my circulation is way worse than it used to be. Sometimes I think I'm going nuts!
I'm so sorry for the long post. I don't want to be a hypochondriac at 23 but having this random pain for almost a year now is really pulling my brain apart. Please let me know if any of this sounds familiar, or what you would look at if you were my doctor. Don't be afraid to tell me it's psychosomatic if you think so. And thank you.