Hello danny
When I was in my late teens I took a drug called merazine: a motion sickness medication I intentionally O.D. on it by taking ten tablets. A couple of my buddies also took that amount. The ingredients in this drug are related to Belladona and I had horrible hallucinations. Giant spiders, jumping frogs in the back seat of the car and other scary hallucinations. When I went into a gas station restroom I looked in the mirror and my pupils were huge and this started a panic reaction and my heart started pounded incredibly fast. I was very frightened and asked by friends to take me to my doctors office. They weren't effected as much as i was by the drug. On the way there I felt my heart stop, and that really threw me into a panic and I was sure I was going to die. I layed on the examination table and watched a naval battle take place on the tiled floor on the examination room. Weird fury cylinder creatures were popping out from behind the defferent equipment in the room. It was like a horrible nightmare.
My heart seemed to stop a couple more times while I lay there, (actually I found out later it was not really stopping but periodically skipping a beat or two) The doctor eventually gave me a shot, a sedative of some sort, and called my mother. When I got home it was the late afternoon and i went to bed and slept till the next morning. I woke up feeling fine but I couldn't stop thinking about my heart and like dreamcatcher I kept taking my pulse all the time, and i was fearful of going to sleep because I felt that if I wasn't thinking about my heart it would stop on its own. My fearful obsession was fueled by occasional irregular heart beats. Soon it was not just the fear that my heart was going to stop but it this fear spread to my breathing. Now i was watching my breathing as well as constantly monitoring my pulse. I devised a way which I could curl my fingers when I was aroung other people and I could feel my pulse in my finger tips so I could minitor it without others knowing what I was doing.
I lived like this for about a year until I was arrested and put in jail for a drug violation. I was looking at the possibility of going to prison for a few years. This was a frightful prospect for me as a mere youth of 18 years. After a few days in the county jail and faced with the possibility of prison in my near future I sunk into a depression. (Fortunately against all odds I was granted probation in stead of Prison) In a way this jail time depression was a stroke of luck for me because I got to the point where I no longer cared whether I lived or died so I stopped obssessing about my heart and my breathing.
And I am still free from those partciular obssessive fears. After a number of years I noticed I was having irregular heart beats, periodically and they were annoying enough that i saw a cardiologist and he put me through the paces with a stress tread mill etc. It turned out that I have a slight irregularity on the tissue of my mitral valve which occasionally hits a certain way when it closes that it causes a double beat and creates the feeling as though it had stopped. He said I had no cause for concern and I guess he was correct at least so far and it has been over twenty years since then.
If the doctor says it is ok or nothing to worry about it probably isn't, but I know that when I was "obssessing" about my heart and my breathing nothing anyone could say would reassure me.
It was when I gave up obssessing about these physical symptoms that the DP/DR hit me with full force.
I have read that these psycho-somatic symptoms and obssessions are often a sort of defense mechanism to try a ward off the development of a neurosis.
Well anyway I feel I can totally relate to your obssessive anxiety about your heart. In fact it is my understanding that it is a fairly common type of neurotic anxiety.
sincerely
john
