Congestive Heart Failure:
Fast heart rate
Irregular heart rate
Trouble breathing-can't catch your breath
Trouble sleeping & you don't know why
Swelling of your feet/legs
You KNOW something is wrong
Worse breathing laying down
At the age of 25, my DD went into heart failure & almost died. In the 2 weeks before that we had noticed that she was getting up at like 4:00 AM & she had no real explanation. But looking back, when she was laying down, her lungs would be filling with fluid so she'd have a hard time breathing & that would be waking her up.This happens because your heart is too weak & too enlarged to push the blood thru your body. She had gone to a doc 2 months before the final night for a check up. The doc said her heart rate was fast & that's all she said. Nothing about further checking up about it.She thought she was nervous about going to the doc. She was working out at a gym (kick boxing) every week. Some people said to her "Man, you must of been working out like H---. Your arteries are pumping like crazy. She thought that was just what was going on. A week before the final night, she was house sitting for a friend in another city & called home & said that her heart was beating like crazy. She thought she was having a panic atack because she was out in the country all alone. On Friday before the final night, she was having fast heart rate & some trouble breathing in the day time but that night said it had gone away & decided to go out of state with her friend. She came home on Sunday. That night she woke us up & she could not breate & heart rate was over 200. I could not get any breath sounds in her lungs with a stethoscope. We live close to a hospital-like 10 min away. I woke up DH & told him to get her to the hospital thinking it would be faster than waiting for an ambulance. When they got there, they made her sit & wait not believing a 25 yo could be having THAT much of a problem. When they finally took her in for an exam, she was so bad they thought that their machine was broken. They got another machine, same thing. SO they finally called cardiologist. They did & started everything on her then. By then her heart was beating so fast but was so enlarged that it was not pumping much blood around her body. Lungs were filled with fluid,legs swollen way up.
They had to stop her heart with meds & then shock her back to life trying to bring her heart rate down. They did this 2X. It didn't work. They kept her alive til the next AM & then docs & nurses took her into Chicago to big hospital there, & did a procedure called ablasion on her heart. They essentially burned off the outer layer of her heart to stop the fluttering electrical impluses that were replacing a regular heartbeat& bring her back to a normalish heart rate. She got a blood clot from that on the surface of her heart. She was on all kinds of blood thinners, heart meds, Many IV's, Blood gas tests every few hours, etc. She was close to death a few nights later & they called us & said get back here. (the prob was while that happened to her, the same day I had to have emergency back surgery so i wouldn't be paralyzed from waist down)So I laid down in the back of our SUV for the hour trip back to Chicago hospital. She made it thru all that & finally got to come home. She had to do injections of blood thinners & a bunch of pills. It took about 11 months to recuperate. She is now 34 & only takes 2 pills & is able to work.