44 Medical Photos and Stories So Unbelievable, They Blur the Line Between Fascinating and Frightening
Ever woken up feeling like your body’s thrown a surprise party—except instead of balloons and cake, it’s sharp pains, bloodshot eyes, and the beginnings of what looks like a medical mystery straight out of House M.D.? Yeah, me too. Picture this: one minute you’re moving furniture and feeling fine, the next your left ribcage is auditioning for a drama role with stabbing pains, your eyes are blazing red like you’ve been crying watching sad movies, and your vision starts playing tricks on you with floaters and cobwebs. Sounds like the start of an unintentional thriller, right? What if I told you that under all this chaos hides a sneaky heart inflammation masquerading as everything but a classic cardiac emergency—because, spoiler alert, heart issues in women don’t always knock with the same old chest-and-arm routine? Buckle up, because this rollercoaster ride through symptoms, scans, specialists, and some seriously weird medical quirks will make you rethink the phrase “know thy body.” Trust me, you won’t want to miss this roller coaster of a diagnosis and the baffling twists that followed! LEARN MORE
I woke up one morning (literally) with the following symptoms:
– Sharp pain in my left ribcage area that felt worse when taking a deep breath or with any sort of movement.
– Sharp pain also radiating into my left shoulder blade and upper back area.
– Gastrointestinal issues.
– Bilateral eye redness with light sensitivity.
– Headache.
After day two of these symptoms, I realized my eyes were getting worse and the pain in my side wasn’t going away. I decided to reach out to my primary doctor for her opinion. She immediately wanted me to go to the ER due to there being red flags for cardiac issues. Since my chest area did not hurt, it didn’t even cross my mind that it could be a heart issue. Also, I had been moving a piece of furniture a few days prior and figured I just hurt myself by doing that. I wasn’t aware until this situation that cardiac symptoms tend to present much differently in women than in men and are not always your classic chest and arm pain. The following morning on day three of having symptoms, both of my eyes were insanely bloodshot, were very sensitive to light, and I developed a pain in my forehead/behind my eyes that was pretty severe. I also want to mention that I don’t suffer from headaches or migraines often and I have always had 20/20 vision. I had no previous eye issues besides dry eyes that I treated with OTC drops. My husband drove me to the ER that day, and upon admission, they started treating the suspected migraine with Toradol and some other meds used in migraine cocktails. Luckily, it worked and did relieve the pain. Since my heart rate was tachycardic and in the 110 range, they ordered an EKG, a CT scan of my chest, and ran a bunch of labs.
My blood tests and imaging showed the following:
Troponin high sensitivity: 95.0
CRP: 18.3
SED rate: 73
NT-proBNP: 468
WBC: 12.39 K/uL
Platelet count: 468
Chest CT with contrast:
Small left pleural effusion, mild patchy and bandlike consolidative changes in the left greater than right lower lobes, central peribronchial cuffing which may be seen with small airway inflammation. (Oddly enough, I had no cough or breathing issues. I’m also not a smoker.) I was asked by the ER doctor if I had an autoimmune disease or if I had been sick recently. He explained that they’ve seen cases of COVID, the flu, and coxsackie virus (such as hand, foot, and mouth disease) causing several different issues, with some being similar to mine. I told the doctor that the last time I was sick was about four months prior with some sort of cold or flu. I had a painful sore throat that felt like I was swallowing razor blades, and I lost my voice for a couple of days. Although my rapid virus panels came back negative at the time, I ended up being diagnosed with acute myopericarditis, and they believed that it was possibly the result of a virus that caused inflammation around my heart and eyes.
I was then transferred by ambulance to a larger hospital for continued heart monitoring and testing, and to stay as an inpatient. I saw several specialists, including infectious disease, cardiology, and rheumatology, and had more testing done—talk about exhausting. They started me on colchicine, which is the gold standard for treating myopericarditis, and it unfortunately gave me an entire day of really bad diarrhea; just what I needed 🙄. Since I couldn’t tolerate it, they had me stop the colchicine and start taking 600 mg of ibuprofen with 60 mg of prednisone. Let’s just say that with that combo, I soon felt like I had superpowers. 😂 The second day after being admitted, I woke up in the morning and went to wash my face. While looking in the mirror, I noticed that my pupil size in my left eye was different than the right and was shaped almost like a square. I also started seeing these black floaters and a cobweb-type thing in my peripheral vision. This definitely sent me into a bit of a spiral consisting of scary thoughts and flashbacks to watching specific episodes of House M.D.
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