Quote:
Originally Posted by RagsToRiches  FYI...
You guys were right, it seems that these are actually physical symptoms and stress is just aggregating it.
I've had a chat with a friend who's a doctor who has indicated it seems to him like Costochondritis, inflammation of the sternum.
He's told me to get it diagnosed, but that it's nothing urgent.
I'll be interested in finding out what could have caused it... |
I get that, though much more rarely these days.
The sternum swells up big and hard and the inflammation can cause the muscles to constrict your heart and lungs sometimes with it causing heart-attack-like symptoms which is how I got diagnosed - crushing pains in the chest, shooting pains in left arm etc etc difficulty breathing. The ambulance wired me up and figured it wasn't a heart attack, and after laying on a hospital trolley in A&E (ER for USers) for 9 hours, a young sprig of a doctor fresh from med school finally figured what I had. After reading about it online I realised I had had it on and off for years.
You can get it from a bad cold or something (all my colds seemed to turn to 'bronchitis' until I discovered I had this and how to treat it - basically I use aspirin! - and it never happens anymore! It was the old cost. inflammation squishing my lungs)., or from overuse of upper body muscles - I had it very badly after an intense few months of swimming, typing for prolonged periods, etc, and also of course stress. So maybe your meditating position is requiring you to hold your upper body muscles in a tense position or maybe you are doing something else using upper body muscles extensively?
The thing you need to know is that if you have a tendency to this and you get an acute attack, it DOES look like a heart attack and you MUST go to the ER because they can only tell you whether it is or isn't by wiring you up.