Strange chest sensations as part of IBS

Hi Cathy,

I was just doing a web search for chest flutter and what you described is exactly what I've been experience for the past few days. In fact I used the exact words "feels like a small animal is living in my chest". I would appreciate your insights. If you like give me an email [email protected]

Don

Don,
You want to be sure your feelings aren't heart-related. Irregular heartbeats can feel similar to having that small animal in your chest! Ever since I have been on 1200mg of Caltrate plus a day, I don't get that feeling any more. If I miss a dose or 2, it begins to come back. So I'm going to assume that it has something to do with some sort of activity in my upper GI tract, that gets transmitted to my chest area. For me, calcium works miracles in calming my entire GI tract down. Could you try it for awhile, and see if that feeling goes away? I absolutely hate that feeling. It's so uncomfortable and distracting. Let me know if the calcium helps at all.

Hi KATZ,
Welcome to HealingWell!
Unfortunately what you are describing can be brought on by many factors (IBS or otherwise). The best thing you can do is see a doctor.
Do you have heartburn, indigestion, gas? Those may all be a possibility you can try to remedy yourself with OTC meds.
Most importantly though, if this is becoming worrisome you really should get it looked into.
Take care.

Being new, I hope I'm not rehashing something here, but I also have the fluttery chest into throat thing and it's been bad the last 2 months. I have not been officially diagnosed with IBS, though it's been suggested.

I do have panic disorder and have had it all my life. Very recently in doing some research toward panic disorder I ran across information linking it to Mitral Valve Prolapse...basically a type of heart murmer...pretty benign in and of itself, but the symptoms can scare the crap out of you (oooh, bad pun).

Heart murmers are very prevalent among women in my family. The interesting thing was the symptoms associated with Mitral Valve Prolapse. The chest pain/sensations, the prevalence of panic disorder and STOMACH/DIGESTIVE issues among others. Suddenly, all the seemingly unrelated issues I've had were making sense under a single diagnosis.

It also suggested that increasing your intake of Magnesium could help substantially. The magnesium work in conjunction with calcium and acts as a kind of relaxer to the body. One symptom of magnesium deficiency was muscle spasms which I also have.

I'm just now trying to increase magnesium, so I can't say if that's going to help yet.

I can say that I think part of my current fluttery chest/panic issues are due to perimenopause. I'm almost 39 and think the hormones are starting to fluctuate. it seems that if you have anxiety issues, that they usually get worse with the onset of menopause.

You men are lucky...

CathyA,
Again, not officially diagnosed with MVP. On 3 separate occassions I've had a health care professional think that they heard something strange when listening to my heart and then promptly dismiss it. That said, my mother, aunt, grandmother, great-aunt and niece have diagnosed heart murmers. My youngest sister, like me has suspected having one for awhile.

The anxiety sucks. I've gone through bouts of it being pretty bad, then years of virtually no problems. I haven't had it this bad since early college years. I've learned coping mechanisms over time that make it easier to tolerate now than when I was younger. Daily exercise helps. Distracting myself, since dwelling on the feelings just spirals into more anxiety, helps. Telling myself that those visits to the emergency room when I felt like I was going to die and it turned out to really be nothing and that this is nothing too helps. Having a husband who doesn't think I'm insane (like previous long-term boyfriend) helps. Boyfriend who coincidentally started having panic attacks when I left him, after making me feel stupid when I had them-gotta love Karma.

Noticing patterns has helped. If I can pinpoint what caused the initial attack, I can dismiss it more easily. Like 1 to 2 days prior to period, it can get bad. If my regular allergies are acting up, I'm prone to attacks. If someone nearly hits me when I driving into work or I'm startled/scared in some other fashion, I'll likely have an attack up to 12 hours later. It took me a while to connect the dots, there. Too much caffiene will give me an attack in the late evening. They aren't nearly as random as they appear at first. Here's a weird one, flourescent lighting, like in a supermarket. My husband does the grocery shopping.

I can stand the chest fluttering. It's when it seems to move into my throat that I start to think I'm having some sort of allergic reaction and then panic that I can't breathe. Then the adrenaline kicks in and I really can't breathe. I'm training myself to remain calm. Sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. Breathing slowly through mouth helps. I tried Xanax. Didn't like the feeling of being drugged. Don't like feeling out of control-the gas you can get at the dentist freaks me out badly. Xanax didn't go well with my job either.

Fortunately, I'm more afraid of what would happen if I gave into the fear. I'm scared I'd easily become agoraphobic. It's bad enough I'm avoiding grocery stores.

I wish I could remember something I heard recently about menopause. I think it was something like...men used to refer to it as 'the dangerous time.' That may not be exactly right, but it was because normally mild mannered women would stop putting up with crap and speak their minds!

(Stomach is being bad tonight...had to stop in the middle of writing to run to bathroom. Better now.)

BecaL,
Can I ask how old you are?
It's funny what you said about your anxiety problem. I'm the same way.....especially since perimenopause. If something really upsets me, it's like it up-regulates my entire sympathetic system........I'm much more anxious, my resting heartrate goes up by about 10-20 beats per minutes, etc. This can last for several months, when it starts finally relaxing again. I was finally put on a beta blocker to bring all this down to a liveable level, and it worked great on everything........migraines, BP, heartrate, panic..........but the tradeoff was that it made me really, really stupid. I've tried to slowly wean off of it, but couldn't do it. And even though I'm now on the previous dose of it, just for those 5 days of trying to wean off it, my sympathetic system is now on over-drive again. I'm wondering if that "stuck-in-the-over-drive-position" has something to do with our IBS???

CathyA,

>but the tradeoff was that it made me really, really stupid.

Sorry, I laughed out loud at that. I'm nearly 39. I'm a commercial artist/web designer and fine artist on the side. My job is to be creative on demand...being drugged made that pretty hard.

I'm not a real fan of medicines to start with. If there is some crazy .0001 percent of the population will have a certain reaction, I'll be that person. My body is hyper-sensitive. Fortunately, I come from a long-line of long-lived women...90 to 100 years of age and with mental faculties intact.

>If something really upsets me, it's like it up-regulates my entire sympathetic system

I've kind of always been that way. I'd blush at the drop of a hat. Yesterday, I'm sitting at work and I get a call. It's the CEO of our company and he asks me if I have a minute and could I come up to his office. My mind starts racing. Why does he want to talk to me? We don't talk. What's wrong? Am I getting fired. This doesn't make sense. My heart is racing.

He wants me to design a website for his son.

Now my body is freaked out for the rest of the day and that was probably the reason my stomach went bezerk last night. And why? I had absolutely no reason to panic. I'm like the most responsible employee ever.

I hate that I react that way and it's been worse lately.

BecaL,
Don't worry.........I was laughing myself when I wrote that! But it's really true. When I was on 75 mg of Toprol, I couldn't even count my chickens at night, when I put them to bed. It was too complicated a thing to do! Then I went down to 50mg, and I could count them again!
You know, you have alot of the symptoms I have, as do alot of other people with fibromyalgia. Do you think you might have that? All of us are very sensitive to meds. In fact, I think some people don't take some of my problems very seriously (including docs), because I just, for the most part, refuse to take medications. But if the side-effects of the med are worse than the problem you're taking them for.........why do it?
about 8 years ago, I went in for a sleep study. I was nervous about it, and my adrenals must have dumped out buckets of adrenalin. I slept only an hour and a half that night. Great, it only cost me a couple thousand dollars and didn't yield any results.
If something exciting/stimulating happens to me in the evening, it will keep me up for hours past my bedtime. So you're not alone.
Have you ever tried bio-feedback? I've been thinking about doing that, and also trying to get back into meditation. But I can't imagine being able to meditate now, without falling asleep!

Cathy & Katz,

Fibromyalgia: in my case I doubt it. I don't really have any pain. The muscle spasms I get aren't like cramps that hurt. It's just a rapid contractions of various muscles. Annoying, but not painful. I don't have fatigue either. If anything, I feel wired...alot. I'm a very driven person. When I get sick, which really isn't often, my husband constantly reprimands me for not taking it easy. I hate just doing nothing. It's torture. I can sit still, for hours, I just have to be doing something that occupies my brain. I don't have a problem falling asleep. The problem comes right at about an hour into sleep when I'll have a panic attack...in my sleep...that sends me flying out of bed. For awhile I dreaded going to bed at night. I'm taking Benadryl for my allergies now since my body seems to be fine with it. I think its tranquilizing effects have helped with the night panic attacks.

MVP: With most of the women in my family having heart murmers, I think this is the most likely senario for me. It comes and goes with me too. Medication can set it off. I was taking Claritin for allergies when it was prescription. My doctor changed me to Clarinex when the Claritin went over-the-counter. The Clarinex made my heart feel like it was going bezerk. The Clarinex was just too strong. I can walk seemingly forever on a flat surface, but it you throw in much of an incline I'll start feeling like I can't breathe. There is of course the odd fluttery sensations in the chest into the throat, but sometimes it's pain in the chest too. I've had that looked at and nothing seems to be wrong. Sometimes it will feel like I'm having too many heartbeats or missing heartbeats. Writing this just made me remember in P.E. class in school, we would exercise and then have to count our heartbeats. I was never able to get the hang of counting the heartbeats. Compared to the people around me, it seemed like I was messing it up somehow. Now I wonder if it wasn't because my beats weren't normal. When my stomach acts up I'll get the chest sensations too.

For the life of me I can't figure out if the panic sets off the stomach or the stomach sets off the panic, but I'm leaning toward...stomach acting up leads to weird chest sensation leads to panic. Then panic leads to more stomach upset. It all happens so fast at times, but they are all connected, definitely.

Usually MVP is something that doesn't come and go and a Dr. would probably have picked it up by now. It sounds like you could be having missed beats called PVC or PaC(I think) which are not normally dangerous but still need to be checked out. I just started with them and when they hooked me up to monitor on treadmill you could see them on the chart. I don't feel them unless I am just sitting but I am sure they are there most the time. Planning on a monitor just to be sure it is not something else. It woke me up last night.

becal,
Thanks for the wesite. That was interesting. I know I have mvp because the dr. I worked for heard the clicking in my heart. He's says this heart thing I feel is the mvp. Which I know is not true, I know it has to be something else. Right now as I am sitting here, I don't have that sensation. I haven't felt it for the whole week. But I did have it for about 3 months everyday. It feels like my heart is doing a series of like 20 more beats really fast then it relaxes for a few mins then it does it again and again and again. I can feel it up into my lower part of my throat. Sometimes I burp, like I feel I have to or something to make it stop, but it doesn't. Sometimes I cough or make myself sneeze to make it the beat regular again but it doesn't help.
See my whole thing is I don't have insurance and the dr I work for doesn't pay well, so I can't afford a cardiologist. I'm just trying to figure out what this darn thing is. I want to stop it. I've had ekg's and that they all come out normal.
about 10 yrs ago I was dx with ibs. So I reading this forum some people think it's IBS causing all of this. When I asked the DR. I work for he said no. I'm so concerned and confused.

cathya,
I'm 33 yrs old. No I never had a holter monitor. We don't have one at work. What is svt?