i am an idiot

[piranha]

in general the aftermath of this tachycardia episode has been milder than the first time. apparently having my heart stopped twice is less of a stressor for my body than beating a mile a minute for several hours. which makes sense -- i wonder how the hell people deal with it who have tachycardia for 24 or 48 hours; *gah*. i've also achieved sleep instead of lying awake forever hoping i won't wake up with the same thing again; that was only an issue the first night.

anyhow, i've been doing pretty well, and for the most part managed to not constantly listen to my own heartbeat. but late yesterday i started feeling physiologically restless, and i began to feel my heart was thumping faster and louder than before. not irregular though. still, after a couple of hours of that i was starting to lose my powers of meditative calm. went to bed with some grapes from the vine and a gay pirate novel (raised by wolves by w.a. hoffman). that worked for a while, and i finally fell asleep after consuming about a third of the book.

this morning i woke up all fine, and, as i am often prone to doing upon waking, had a realization. yesterday, some time before the thumping started, i had suddenly felt a hankering for lady grey tea, and so i had a mug of that instead of my standard decaf coffee or rooibos tea (i go through long phases of drinking and eating the same things).

now, i gave up caffeine quite a while ago, and hadn't had any at all in about a year. lady grey tea has caffeine. so that was it. i recognize the symptoms really clearly as caffeine-induced from prior experience. i guess i didn't twig to it right away because i had been a massive caffeine consumer for decades, and when i gave it up, i could easily drink several cups of strong coffee or tea right before bed without it having any noticeable effect.

Comments

[blur01.livejournal.com]

Ok, well you got that...stop it.

caffeine

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

*snrk*. yeah, i hadn't intended that.

now i am pondering whether i should package up all my black teas and donate them to the foodbank (or use them for dyeing), or whether i should just put them in the back of the cupboard hoping i'll remember that for now i want to stay away from caffeine.

i'm not really a teetotaler; i hadn't planned to give it up completely.

Re: caffeine

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Twinings do a decaf Lady Grey -- I'm suddenly unsure. They definitely do a decaf Earl, and I think they do a decaf Lady.

I'd keep it in the back of the cupboard. There are times when caffeine, to the non-addicted, can be very useful, and not just using it (with vitamin C) instead of sleep. One time is when you want to get tylenol and/or codeine to your brain quickly. Caffeine goes directly to your brain, and it takes the painkiller with it. They make an OTC painkiller with that combination, Solpadine, but my doctor told me you could get the same result with ordinary stuff and a cup of tea. In times of migraine and bad toothache, I've been very glad to know that.

Re: caffeine

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

huh. i didn't know that about the codeine. interesting.

and yes, twinings makes a decaf lady grey (googled). never seen it around here, but online ordering can help with that. thanks! two tips; you win at commenting.

i'll probably keep the open packages around for guests or for when i feel safe about drinking something caffeinated. which might happen. the guests, i mean.

Re: caffeine

[prairierabbit.livejournal.com]

My trick is to wrap things I want to think about eating/drinking up in wrapping paper. It's there, but definitely different than other stuff in the cupboard. (Especially when I buy chocolate oranges after Christmas. To keep. For later. Unless I eat them all within a week, which wrapping them seems to remind me not to do.)

[huashan.livejournal.com]

Ok...well at least I'm not the only person that freaked themselves out with the first caffeine after quitting. I went 3 months at one point without caffeine, very likely for the first time since I was 2 years old or so. I don't remember what caused me to get another Dew after all that time, but since I'd never felt the effects of caffeine before, I thought I'd really triggered some kind of horrible problem with my body. Scared the crap out of me.

(I've been drinking strong black tea for as long as I can remember, then caffeinated soda starting when I was a teenager. Tea was all my mom ever drank, so I'm sure it was my first drink of something out of a parents cup.)

[novazembla.livejournal.com]

I'm not totally decaffimated, but I did decide about three or four years ago to cut wa-a-ay back, because I was starting the day with a big cappuccino with four shots in it, and that was before I got to work. I'll usually do a diet soda over lunch, but that's one shot of caffeine a day as opposed to the, golly, ten or so daily I was probably getting before. Come to think of it, I did get to the point where I'd have sometimes have a cappuccino late in the evening without losing sleep over it. Confirming that substance tolerance is a sign of the addict.

@%<

[daev.livejournal.com]

This tachycardia thing happened to me last night.

It scared the hell out of me.

If it weren't for your writing about it, I wouldn't even know what it was called. That helped a lot, actually.

But I got very very little sleep, and I felt this horrible sense of DOOM connected with everything I was thinking.

I didn't even drink any caffeine so I don't know why it happened. My only guess is that it's due to having stayed up late trying to power through a lot of programming work.

I don't know how people can live when it goes on for days. I felt like my heart was a trapped squirrel thrashing wildly about.

Scary.

tachycardia

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

oy, how come i didn't get an email notification for this?

no shit, it is very scary -- sort of really instructive about how important our heart is to our functioning. not that we, as intelligent people, don't know that. but there's a difference between intellectually knowing and viscerally experiencing. i am glad my writing about it helped; that's really a main reason for me to write about any health problems (since i generally prefer to not share those with people). the *poing* and i sometimes talk about how so much weird shit human bodies do doesn't get explained to us casually some time so we'd be better prepared (those those floaters in eyes -- totally normal. but i freaked the first time i had one, i thought "detached retina, i am going blind!").

there are lots of possible causes for arrhythmias, some more some less serious. and yeah, stress of trying to power through work can bring it on. are you doctor-averse?

[daev.livejournal.com]

Oops, that was supposed to be a reply to the main thread.

Nonetheless, one of the thing I was thinking about was your remark about saying "immune" to the Monkey Death God. Last night I was thinking "still immune, dammit, go away!"