OPINION:
About six months ago, I collapsed in the kitchen whilst making my daughter’s breakfast. I am not a person prone to fainting fits, so it took me by surprise, not least because it was accompanied by a sudden spike in my resting heart rate, my smart watch informing me it had gone from 52 beats per minute to 170 in what felt like a split second. I came to on the floor, with a butter knife in my hand. All I remember thinking was: thank God I wasn’t carving a roast.
My husband, who is infinitely more sensible than me, insisted I go and see a doctor. I thought that was a bit dramatic, and that it was probably just stress, or hormones (when you are a woman, you put everything down to stress or hormones). He looked at me as if I was mad, which, now I come to think about it, is how he looks at me about 90 per cent of the time.
“You just collapsed doing nothing more pressing than spreading peanut butter on toast,” he tutted. “If that doesn’t constitute a trip to the GP, I don’t know what does.” I thought about reminding him of the time I went into labour and he suggested I take a paracetamol and go back to bed, but thought better of it.
Confession: I’ve had palpitations on and off for decades. In my twenties I attributed them to too much partying, and then in my thirties, when I stopped partying, I attributed them to perimenopause. The GP seemed to agree that it was probably all a bit of a fuss about nothing, but referred me for a routine ECG “just in case”. Just as I was about to leave, he asked me if I had ever heard of something called a panic attack. I left feeling a bit stupid – a mental health campaigner unable to differentiate between panic and proper palpitations.