For the last few weeks I have had intermittent chest pain, sometimes at rest rather than when walking. I went to see a GP yesterday and she insisted that I go to A and E immediately, offering to to call for an ambulance immediately, which I declined. She was concerned about the possibility of unstable angina. A and E was packed and in spite of signs saying patients were required to wear masks I estimate at least a third of them were not doing so, many coughing and sneezing. They were not challenged or offered surgical masks by hospital staff. My troponin test level was 14 (the highest reading classified as normal -in April it was 16). Two ECGs were taken, both were classified as “abnormal” , but the doctor said there was nothing major amiss-they indicated that I might have right bundle-branch block (which has also shown on various Kardia readings). The diagnosis was that I have stable angina as well as PAF. There were no signs of unstable. This will have to wait to be fully confirmed with a CT angiogram in about 6 weeks but the doctor said he was confident of his diagnosis. I was told to take 75mg of aspirin daily and to start medication for angina. Apparently there is no cure and the condition is progressive. Diet will not make much difference. All in all a very bleak day and I am still trying to absorb the rather grim news.
Diagnosed with stable angina - Atrial Fibrillati...
Diagnosed with stable angina
Take your time, a diagnosis can always knock you back. So sorry to hear what you are going through.
😘
Thanks. I’m due for the Covid vaccine on Saturday and have just been reading your comments and those of others on that topic. I had a lot of problems (lots of ectopics and more frequent PAF) with the booster last November and don’t really want any more symptoms at the moment.
I’ve had covid for two weeks - I went for the flu jab first then caught covid before I could get the booster. You do not want it, believe me! If the booster affects you think what the real thing might do 😨
completely agree. I got covid just after having the booster as it hadn’t had time to work. Covid was horrid for me. The best that can be said is that I didn’t need to go to hospital but I do not want it again in a hurry. My husband was not as poorly as me but still doesn’t want it again. The jab is worth it even if it causes a few side effects. I guess we need those boosters. X
I have deferred the vaccination for a week to have time to investigate further.
It's a real dilemma, in your position I would think about delaying until you are feeling a little more resilient but not cancelling.
Good advice. That’s exactly what I am thinking of doing.
I had Covid early in Jan 2022 before it was officially announced what it was. It was like having a severe case of flu, but it really wasn’t that much worse. it is the lasting fatigue that is worrisome but my adult son was staying with us temporarily and he too had it. He seemed to be worse than I was. Yet, my husband never caught it. Very mysterious. No vaccines available and yet we didn’t die and we didn’t need a hospital. I will say I do a lot of holistic things that have worked with other viruses and we recovered fine. Therefore I didn’t feel I needed to poison myself with a vaccine all the while they continued to lie about natural immunities. Most of us because of our health issues seem to understand things more than the average person, and we know without a doubt that natural immunities are superior to vaccines. An example, when I was a kid chicken pox went around and i seemed never to have gotten them. Unless it was such a mild case it went unnoticed. When I had my own kids and they got chicken pox I thought i was going to end up with them also. I didn’t so I must had natural immunities from a mild case of them. I also have learned that during a pandemic people should not be vaccinated because it causes more variants. Hmm. How many do we now have? I read an article that there are about 5 going around. How many does the vaccine protect. Just like flu vaccines they always seem to have the wrong variant in the shots. Just my opinion. Everyone needs to do what they are comfortable with. I am comfortable with not gumming up my system with chemicals and additives that only make me feel worse.
I get what you are saying, take care.
I would not rush into getting the vaccination. IT did affect my heart condition.Enough not to get another Vax.. We are all different though.Dont be pushed into it.
Can you be more specific, please? I think we do need the vaccine and that it is safe, but information such as yours needs to be known - but are you sure it was vaccine related? Our friend's daughter is currently very poorly with long covid, for example, and I hadn't realised that what she has was a possibility given her vaccination status.
Steve
HI Steve
Well I experienced angina following my phiizer injection..The second one.Enough to alarm me as my heart had been relatively stable prior .I have a cardiac history. Don't really like having to go into it .It was reported to my Dr.I think anyone with a chronic medical condition should be monitored carefully following these vaccinations.
I think that’s very good advice. Thanks for replying. It was kind of you. The dilemma is that covid is almost impossible to avoid catching and can wreak havoc with the heart and, as our friend’s daughter has sadly discovered, the kidneys.
As an aside, I have just read that there are currently more people hospitalised with covid in New York at this moment than during the first wave and yet few are now taking any precautions. Again, the confusion exists in my mind - are they in hospital because of their covid or for some other reason? I can’t find that out. What is clear is that the new variety of the virus is not pleasant at all to catch.
Steve
oh dear.And of course you are coming in to Winter.Im in Australia. A Very hot Spring time right now.Yes I guess it's the same for you now that people don't even have to take precautions apart from hospitals and maybe Nursing homes.It makesyou wonder what's happening to the world.Im glad I have my faith.I would hate to think how I would be coping during these times without it.
A faith can be helpful in these times. Our friends in Victoria were almost flooded in your recent rains but just avoided it, thankfully.
You worked your way through my typos, I believe. I’m sorry! Autocorrect on my phone is less than helpful at times.
Steve
I'm laughing as I am in Aussie land as well and have NEVER been so cold in all my life.I want to come where you live, please.
If they are in hospital for covid and not for something else and just happen to test positive do you really think that that is a good advert for the vaccines? They are supposed to prevent hospitalisation and New York has a better level of vaccination uptake than lots of "redneck" states given the level of politicisation of the vaccines in America. Even if the BA4/5 strains that are circulating now are worse than the earlier strains of Omicron they are not as dangerous as the original Wuhan strain or the Alpha variant that followed it. What is sure is that they are a waste of time as far as knocking the pandemic on the head which is what we were promised 2 years ago. As for "almost impossible to avoid catching" my anecdotal experience is that I have never caught it ( as far as I know - I might have had an asymptomatic case) but nearly all the people that we know have caught it at least once since being triple jabbed and two of them were quite poorly. One friend has had it twice. I believe my husband had the original Wuhan strain before there was testing and he was nowhere near as ill as he was with his previous run in with a respiratory bug in 2016. Despite 24/7 close contact I caught nothing. Same in Feb this year when he had a mild bug that was possibly Omicron. He has never been vaccinated and it is now 14 months since my one Janssen jab ( which my local health authority told me six weeks later was not enough to ensure protection any more and another was needed). There are probably millions of people who have never had a symptomatic case of covid despite being in contact with infected people.
Here is some interesting data which is not anecdotal but verified research statistics:
- Up to October 2022, there have been 82,276 hospitalisations of people with covid among fully-vaccinated people in New York State. This sounded quite amazing to me until I read that this corresponds to a mere 0.61% of the population of fully-vaccinated people 5-years or older.
- Also, breakthrough cases have occurred in just 17.63% of fully vaccinated individuals.
- And there have been 12.19 hospitalisations per 100,000 population compared with just 1.82 / 100,000 in fully vaccinated individuals.
The vaccine is clearly doing an extraordinarily good job at preventing severe covid with all that entails both for individuals with the disease and, perhaps more importantly, in allowing health systems and ICU units to keep running and treating others with other illnesses than covid (which was not the case in the pre-vaccinations days of the pandemic).
Steve
There are some things to be pointed out here. First of all counting from age 5. You would not expect hospitalisations in children and young people and indeed statistics for all countries show these to be really rare . A breakdown by age would be far more useful. Secondly among the population not counted as fully vaccinated there will be many people who are actually injected but have not passed the 2/3 week window after their jabs to be counted as vaccinated. This skews things a lot as the dampening of the immune system by the injections means that this is the time when people are most vulnerable to catching covid and because their immune system is not functioning properly they will probably do worse than if they had not been injected - with a greater risk of hospitalisation. This is being counted as an infection in the unvaccinated . Then there are the people who have already caught covid but are unaware of it when they go for the jab. Getting the jab when actually being infected is not advised as you generally become more ill. This happened to my daughter with her booster last Dec . She started with symptoms of covid immediately after the jab, tested positive and was just as unwell as when she caught the more virulent Wuhan strain back in 2020. Indeed both the FDA and the health authorities here in France advise to wait 3 months between recovering from covid infection and getting either a primary vaccination series or a booster. Goodness knows why 28 days is considered ok in the UK. Thirdly as far as hospitalisations go some American hospitals do not count as vaccinated people who have not received their injections with a facility registered with the hospital. So for instance people who have got jabbed at Walgreens (a pharmacy chain) can find themselves being counted as unvaccinated in the hospital electronic records even though it might be written somewhere in their notes! Statistics from " real world " experience are often riddled by confounders of various types which is why data from properly conducted RCTs are preferable. But properly is the operative word here.
You are right to suggest those provisos but I truly do not think that the statistics have been presented fraudulently. Rather I believe that they have been presented as the best we have available. The reality is that idiosyncrasies aside, the vast majority of people receiving the Covid vaccines will suffer no more than a sore arm and maybe a day of generalised discomfort. Indeed placebo controlled blinded studies have struggled to show a significant difference between live vaccine and saline, so far as I understand it. The reality of catching the disease itself is very different, with vast numbers of people (albeit still a relatively small percentage, especially counting in the unknown asymptomatic cases) suffering significantly and overloading the emergency care systems.
It comes down to trusting science or not. That isn't the same as trusting governments or even health authorities, I suppose.
Steve
I trust scientific method if it is applied properly. I just do not believe that is the case with these vaccines or the treatment of repurposed drugs for covid. I think Lancetgate and the whistleblowing with regard to the Ventavia trial sites illustrate this.
I think the so-called Lancetgate debacle showed only that peer reviewing isn't foolproof and, I suppose, too, that openness of data sources is still not enforced and jolly well ought to be. And yet the WHO still, eventually, stopped the study of HCQ because it simply was not an effective treatment. It's a strange drug that provides some real benefit in various inflammatory and some autoimmune conditions and yet its mode of action isn't well understood, and it can often be or become after use, worryingly toxic.
As for Ventavia, I haven't looked very deeply into this. It doesn't surprise me that laxness and fraud are a part of our systems, especially when profits and costs are under pressure. The capitalist system creaks badly at times, and, I suspect far more than anyone realises. And yet, the law as well as other checks and balances do exist and are, in general, effective. I trust this limits what fraud goes. Also, I don't know just how much what Ventavia did actually altered the facts regarding the effectiveness and safety of the Pfizer vaccine, if at all. The evidence is that the vaccine has shown itself extraordinarily capable of preventing the serious form of covid such that those entering ICU with the disease almost invariably are unvaccinated.
Steve
Here is the states, its says right on the FDA website that it causes myocarditis. Who needs that? We have athletes dropping dead on the playing field. That is being denied and called Sudden Adult death. Really?
The incidence of vaccine induced myocarditis is vanishingly small and has occurred mostly in younger men given the mRNA vaccines:
thelancet.com/journals/lanc...
Sudden cardiac deaths in athletes has been an issue since well before covid arose in 2019. It seems possibly to be related to the psychology of sports people in more recent years whereby sportsmen, mainly, are excessively training and straining their hearts (which may have a pre-existing undetected weakness). This study is from 2016, three years before the appearance of covid-19:
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl...
Steve
This study reported in the Lancet makes it perfectly clear that there is no long term data on morbidity from vaccine induced myocarditis or pericarditis even though short term prognosis seems favourable despite continuing abnormalies detected on examination. . The risk benefit analysis for young people is what is important. Which is perhaps why some countries are not recommending vaccination for younger age groups any longer. Denmark is not now offering fu(rther vaccination to people under 50.
That is certainly true, and is a real worry that is being actively and at very great expense, investigated around the world using MRI scanning in particular to look at cardiac muscle changes. Also, it's true to say that very little is understood concerning cardiac myopathies in their early stages. The sad reality that the heart muscle is unable to regenerate itself, like for example, the liver, brings this unknown into sharper focus. That does bring questions about vaccinating young men in particular, but those are questions for the ethics committees and those who advise them. It is completely out of our knowledge sphere to pretend we can gainsay these expert groups in my view. If we choose to go against advice, then that is our prerogative.
Steve
it’s a dilemma. Risk Covid or lots of AF.
Please take your time, I know it is hard with the diagnosis and so sorry for what you are going through. I was diagnosed with Angina some years back after many tests and CT Angiogram and also angiogram. Mine comes on when I am mostly at rest. I have AF, SVT and VT and a pacemaker insitu.
I spoke to a GP this morning. A and E have produced a “confirmed diagnosis” of stable angina which means they are confident of its reliability. The CT angiogram will determine how serious it is. What has shocked me is how quickly it came about: just over a year ago I would think nothing of walking 10 km without problems; now chest pain can come about after walking only a few hundred metres. I also hate using the spray which makes you look (and feel) really decrepit. I don’t know if there are fast-acting under-the -tongue tablets you can take instead of the spray (as opposed to the long-acting tablets taken daily). My mother had this condition before dying of a stroke aged 78. The distances she could walk became progressively shorter and shorter until should could barely manage 100m. This diagnosis is as bad as the AF one. And I’ve read that AF and CAD are a ghastly double-act who feed off each other.
Oh dear, sorry to hear about you diagnosis. I hope it will stay in abeyance for a long time and you can avoid any other problems for a while. Good luck and best wishes.
not sure what stable Angina is.Any episode to me is unstable angina?It seems that you have had a blip should settle with a period of time
All I can say as I have an unstable heart condition is that I listen to my specialist but I try not to dwell upon it .When we think about things a lot and get anxious it seems to increase the symptoms. The Mind /Body connection is very powerful. Try not to even think that it could be hereditary because I don't think that that helps us.I go through roller coasters of ups an downs with angina .I hope things improve for you soon .You can do it.😊✔
Update to double dose of Bisoprolol 
Flecainide: Worse AFib attack ever after being prescribed at a+e admission
To Dial 999 or Not
My consultation with an EP
Heart muscle thickness.
