UPDATE:
Since posting this 16 days ago I can say drinking more water with mag drops before bed does indeed seem to help with the cramping feeling. Legs feel more relaxed all night. And I have had less feeling like they might cramp. Thanks @David_Stilley for the suggestion.
But I have not been able to get rid of the intermittent forceful pulse. I thought it was gone when I went several days with no symptoms. Then it came back for no reason I can figure out.
It then went away again, and came back again. I’ve been keeping a log of every time I eat something, drink something, go the bathroom, and sleep. I record what I ate, every suppliment I take, how much, and when. Yet there’s still no consistant bit of info that stands out as correlating to when I start feeling this.
I’ve also started scoring it on 0 - 10 for how bad it is. 0 means “I don’t feel anything abnormal with my hear at all” and 10 would be “take me to the ER right now” but I haven’t gone over 7 yet thankfully.
Last Thursday I called my doctor to tell them I was having this symptom pretty bad and would like to see someone while it’s going on. What I got instead was a 10 minute talk with a nurse who had me take my blood pressure and then a call back from her saying the doctor wants me to get a holter monitor test again. I did one 5 years earlier for some other very different intermittent feeling. It was totally negative for problems then, and it this time the only things they noticed were a couple episodes of light fluttering that were of no concern.
Of course when I got to the place to get the holter monitor the day after my call, I wasn’t feeling much of the forceful pulse anymore. And the two days I had it on, I felt pretty much ok the whole time other than a pretty strong change when I went up a flight of stairs a few times.
Normally a single flight of stairs does nothing to me. I have a 14% body fat. I’m in my mid 40s. When I do cardio I can get up to 170 BPM before it feels at all bad. I can keep it around 150 to 160 for 20+ minutes. But when I’m feeling this forceful pulse, squating to pet a dog makes my heart pound. Walking one flight of stairs does. Cleaning a litter box does.
When this is happening, I can sit in a chair or lay down and it will just continue to pound. The rate may go lower unless I get anxious about it, but the pounding will keep going even when I’m totally still for 10 minutes.
I got a Basic Metabolic panel a couple weeks ago and all my numbers were very much in the normal range. I was feeling pretty normal at the time of that blood draw. Then yesterday I was feeling pretty horible after the forceful pulse started roughly 36 hours earlier. Two nights of poor sleep and it wasn’t going away during the day either.
So I called the doctor again and said “I’d like to see someone today while this is happening so I don’t have to go to the ER instead. It’s not an emergency. I just keep wasting time going to doctors days after the symptoms subside”
That got more attention and they made me an appointment with a different doc for an hour after the call. The nurse did blood pressure and pulse. The results were higher than my normal, but still just below the point where “They recommend treatment”.
This doctor took more time to talk with me, listened to heart and lungs etc. In the end his suggestion was along the lines of “You may just be focusing on it too much, and anxiety may be exacerbating it”. He had no interest in the fact that I’ve been in ketosis for about 3 months and have lost 36 lbs since starting eating this way 4 months earlier. He had no interest in my questions about electrolytes since my readings were all in their “normal” ranges. He dismissed the idea that it might be dehydration saying “Have you ever been dehydrated? You would know if you are dehydrated. First signal is you get thirsty.” Then he went on to tell me that “God designed our bodies so that we don’t hear or feel our muscles or heartbeat”. And at that point I decided that continued attempts at rational conversation were pointless.
The visit ended with him suggesting I do a three day trial of taking anti-anxiety meds for all three days to see if that keeps the forceful pulse at bay. If it does, talk to a psychiatrist instead because my heart is doign fine. Then I went and got another blood draw for Basic Metabolic Panel.
So I started that 3 day trial yesterday. I didn’t take any electrolytes the whole day. I just ate normal low carb foods, some of which had a lot of sodium. My forceful pulse (FP) started getting worse even with the anti-anxiety med in system since morning. I took another dose of it in the evening. I didn’t feel anxious about anything. But the FP kept getting stronger. I ate a huge helping of cauliflower “Mac and Cheese” from the perfectketo recipe and the FP continued to get worse. There was 1/2 t regular sea salt in what I ate in addition to whatever was in the cheeses and cauliflower. I drank a couple glasses of water with and after this meal.
I took a nap for about 3 hours and woke with the FP stronger than before. I’d rate it at a 6 or 7 out of 10. At that point I got a glass of water and added 1/4 t of Potassium Chloride and drank that down. Within 30 minutes the FP feeling was down to roughly 1 or 2.
I got my test results back today and found that my sodium was higher than normal a couple weeks ago when I was feeling fine. All my other scores were fairly normal for me. This last test from yesterday when I wasn’t feeling right came back with my sodium having droped from the top of the normal range to the bottom of the normal range. Chloride was also way down and at the bottom of the range.
The night before that blood draw I drank down some extra sodium and a lot of water and didn’t feel any better. But I urinated a lot more than normal too. I’m guessing there was something going on with sodium/potassium balance and my system was flushing too much.
I’d think maybe my glucose is too low. But my test showed 98. My past tests were all in the 90s also. I got a keto breath meter yesterday and it read 6 once and 7 the next few times through the day, right before bed, and after waking. It says 7 is “Very high, deep ketosis”.
So, I’m still thinking this is electrolyte related, but the numbers in tests have failed to support this. And I can’t get a consistant response to taking the salts with water. Sometimes I feel better in 15 to 30 minutes, other times worse. Sometimes I try sodium, sometimes potassium, sometimes both, sometimes with magnesium. Can’t find any consistency.
Now I’m going to go get a calcium score CT scan and probably find that it too is perfectly healthy… Yet somehow I keep randomly feeling like crap in a very specific way.