By the way . . . I really don’t want to shop ‘til I drop
IWAS strolling down the street the other day about to start a little retail therapy. I had time on my hands and not a care in the world when suddenly I got a searing pain across my chest. It startled me. Surely I couldn’t be having a heart attack?
I had just come off a flight but it was only a quick spin across the Irish Sea so nothing that would constitute a clot risk. I didn’t have any respiratory symptoms so a collapsed lung or so-called walking pneumonia was unlikely. In fact, I was feeling totally fine when I set out on my mission.
I nipped into a cafe and had a cup of tea. The pain remained but had lessened. My breathing was fine and I wasn’t having any palpitations. Surreptitiously I did a bit of self examination, much to the bemusement of the man I was sharing a table with. I think he thought I had been shoplifting and stashed my loot down my top. A few prods and pokes I self-diagnosed a pulled muscle. An intercostal muscle to be precise.
These muscles lie between the ribs, attaching them to one another. Typically they are injured during some sort of twisting movement. I racked my brain as to what was the cause and then remembered I had started a ritual of bouncing my six-year-old onto the bed in a blanket. She weighs about 28kg. Put into perspective, that’s almost three sets of hand luggage or 28 bags of sugar.
I did it every night this week without thinking and then suddenly — wallop. My pain was sharp, searing and really aggravated by sneezing or taking a deep breath. One could easily have been excused for rushing straight to A&E and fearing the worst.
As a rule of thumb any chest pain that you can reproduce by pressing the chest wall is most likely to be musculoskeletal. When describing a pain, using the PQRTS method helps. P stands for position and provoking factors, Q stands for the quantity and quality of the pain (rate it out of 10), R stands for radiation — does the pain move anywhere? S stands for severity and T references the timeline of the pain.
Ultimately, if in doubt you simply have to go to A&E. I had insider knowledge and after my self-assessment knew I could carry on, safe in the knowledge that I was not going to shop until I dropped!