I Need Some Support Today

[PoorRichard]

I'm new here. My name is Richard, and I'm one of those guys who looks at all of those symptoms forums online and suddenly thinks I have everything I'm reading about. I'm 44 years old, 6 foot and 270 lbs. Trying hard to lose weight. So my latest worry: What if symptoms I'm feeling are not just GERD? What if it's cancer? Can someone tell me if these symptoms sound like GERD? First, let me say I do have a see-a-doctor plan. Even though I have no insurance, there's a research study about to begin here in a few weeks regarding GERD medicines. When you do one of these studies, a doctor examines you to diagnose whether you have that ailment or not...and they pay you instead of you paying them. But that's a few weeks away.

The symptoms: A few weeks ago, I started noticing pain in my right chest area as well as occasional stomach cramps. The chest pains worried me most at the time as I thought "heart problems." But it was just the right side. Then I started noticing pains on my left side....more so than the right side. So then my hear-attack fears worsened. But it was never the classic kind of pain you always hear associated with heart attack warnings. Never felt like a crushing pain....more like just a short, half-second long shooting pain, and not terribly painful. Also, my heart rate always stayed normal (always a resting rate in the 70s). Blood pressure usually just "high normal". And pain never radiated to the arm.

Then along with the chest pain, I started feeling a LOT of bitter junk coming up in my throat..esp. after meals. Occasionally felt a warmness in my chest...like someone was lighting a fire inside of my torso. I also started feeling a slight feeling like a pill was stuck in my throat.

Now in the past week, the chest pains are almost entirely gone. But the sensation of something stuck in my throat sometimes feels much more significant. This morning, for instance (which is why I'm feeling anxious today). Today it feels like something much larger than a pill is stuck in my throat. I felt like this a few days ago too...and I tried to see if there was a common link, and I do know that the last meal I had in both cases included bacon. I don't know if that's a coincidence or what. (one time was pork bacon, one was turkey bacon).

One other symptom....Ok, there's that pill-in-throat feeling. But I do occasionally, several times a day, have a shooting pain that lasts half a second just an inch or so to the left of the adam's apple.....Feels close to the neck / throat...but not the same location as the lump in my throat. Oh yeah, I do seem to get headaches a lot.

In the past few days, I have started taking ZANTAC twice a day, except for the occasional slip like last night's bacon, I've tried to eat low-fat, low-acid, non-spicy fooRAB for the past few days, and I've been staying upright after I've eaten. And I'm trying to eat several smaller meals, paced evenly through the day. I'm also on a diet / exercise plan to try to lose weight. And since I've started on this regimen, I've had FAR LESS of the bitter stuff coming up in my throat And yesterday, I felt almost fully better....not even the sensation of anything stuck in my throat (until I ate last night, the meal that included the bacon).

What do you guys think? GERD? Or something worse?

 

[dmize23235]

gerd here since 2001.....yep, sounRAB like gerd to me....the shooting pains not so much, but the "stuck in the throat feeling", yes....the burning...yes...NEVER EAT LESS THAN 4 HOURS BEFORE BED!!! and remeraber, you don't have to eat to have gerd,,,,the stomach is always producing acid and if you have anxiety like i do and it sounRAB like you do too, it makes it much worse..prilosec saved me...i was on the prescription, and then when it went OTC it was like a christmas present.....

 

[nessie01]

hi i have all your stuff and more, so yes i would say gerd, sorry to say thou.
i hope you can find a good doctor and hope you respond to meRAB, most people do well everyone that i no is living normally with PPI, however im still praying for my miricle and hoping that my switch to a diff PPI wil be my miralce..............there is heaps of info on here but if ya havnt been to a doctor best go and see a specilst as well to rule out other stuff.

take care
ness

 

[grannymac]

Definitely GERD. For a nuraber of years, I'd wake up choking with fire in my lungs, and never knew what it was, until I started on fosamax for bones...instructions were if I had trouble swallowing, stop and call doc. I did, and I did...an EGD showed severe narrowing of the esophagus plus hiatal hernia, plus a lot of ulceration in the esophagus. A follow-up EGD a few months later, after Nexium showed healing, but it was after THAT EGD that I started having major issues.

The followup was 9/04, and starting the next day, I had 8 bouts of pneumonia in 8 months, requiring hospitalization. Then, there was a gap of a few months, then another bout, another 13 months of reprieve, then it started all over again - in the spring of 2007, (2 bouts); fall of 2007 (2 bouts) and from 2/08 til now, 6 bouts of pneumonia. Some say aspiration pneumonia (due to the GERD), some say not, because aspiration pneumonia is so much harder to clear up. Now, I might have idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis instead of the COPD I've been dx'd with since 2005 (a CT scan and possible biopsy are in the works). I still have GERD, however, and it seems as if I end up back in the hospital everytime I have a few bouts of choking/coughing. ::sigh:: I don't know!