OY, MY TICKER
Ugh, it's no wonder I've been feeling so off-kilter lately. I think I need to see a heart specialist again.

I was laying in bed wondering why my body feels so shakey, sort of swaying irregularly as if there were earthquake tremors around me. I've been experiencing this feeling when sitting and laying down lately, which brought me to the conclusion that I'm utterly too accustomed to the possibility of earthquakes... but...

I have a heart arrythmia. I've had it since after I graduated from High School. It took me a while to figure out that there was something wrong with me and then, as paranoid as I was, to convince my parents I wasn't just being a hypochondriac. When I'm in a relaxed state, my heart seems to enjoy not the drumbeat clockwork regularity of a normal pace but a spastic patterned or non-patterned set of triplet and quadruple beats.

They called it a pre-Atrial contraction, which means my heart just goes a bit extra sometimes. Because it only does it when I'm relaxed and not when I'm excersising (though I have wondered lately...) and because it causes me no faintness or nausea (well, it does but only minor discomfort...) it's not a problem. I've never experienced any serious symptoms and it's not even something they put on my record. They said a lot of women experience abnormal heartbeats in their early twenties.

But...

I just clocked my resting heart rate at 112 beats per minute... after I had been lying prone in bed reading a book for 45 minutes. Every 3-4 seconds, my heart is beating in rapid-fire octuplets with a .5 (or so) second pause between sets. And the reason I felt my body move is because it's pumping away with a fervor that would make you think I was running.

I don't suspect I'm about to drop dead... but I'm just a wee bit freaked out. My sister has Wolf-Parkinson-White syndrome and the doctors told me there's no way I have the same problem. But I'm beginning to wonder. Even so, when she went in for repairative surgery, they couldn't fix the thing that was supposed to be wrong with her because it wasn't there. So we're in the same boat regardless. I guess I just need to get on with my life and forget about it, eh?

UPDATE: This morning after I got out of bed, I clocked my heart rate at 120bpm. Same octuplet pattern. UGH. Well, I'm still going to the gym today and I'll try to observe what it does when I'm running to see if it's really developed into something to be paranoid about.

UPDATE 2: Clocked my heart rate at the gym to find it the same as usual. When I exercise, even though I'm in pretty good shape, my heart rate is usually around 140bpm but in a completely steady pattern. One thing that concerns me is that my heart rate during exercise seems to stay fairly high even when I'm taking a break but that may just be a result of my normal (70-80 bpm) resting heart rate.