I Almost Went Paralyzed Again...

     On Friday my cardiologist officially diagnosed me with Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome. Because of that he increased my mididrine dose from 5mg daily to 15mg. I'm not a huge fan of this medication to begin with it always makes me nauseous and if I don't eat within ten minutes of taking it I get extremely sick. Yesterday, even though I ate when I took it at lunchtime, I must not have ate enough and ended up getting violently sick. The problem with this is that my potassium will drop incredibly fast when I get sick. Even though I was trying to keep up with me getting sick by taking potassium it wasn't working. I was still starting to feel the effects of low potassium. My team and I decided it was best to go into the ER to be monitored and replenish the potassium safely instead of guessing at home.
     I was triage and taken to a bed right away when they saw how high my heart rate was and that it was also skipping beats. I could barely walk, stand, and breathe on my own by the time I got there. I was incredibly anxious because low potassium paralyzes you, it starves your muscles until they are no longer able to move and then major muscles start shutting down. The last time my potassium was this low I was taken to the ER by ambulance and the paramedics were breathing for me because my body just didn't have the capability anymore. My potassium was indeed extremely low at 2.4. I was starting to have tremors and bouts of not being able to breathe. We started infusing IV potassium as quickly as we could. They gave me a total of 160meq of potassium over a four hour period. Unfortunately, potassium is also hard on my stomach so about two hours into the infusion I ended up getting sick again and we had to redo 80meq of potassium. I was in the ER for a total of 8 hours. The doctors there and I decided that if I responded well to this treatment then there wouldn't be a reason for me to stay overnight because we do know what caused the initial drop. I'm extremely thankful for my team of doctors who I can call whenever I need them as well as amazing ER staff who were quick to react and got me back where I needed to be.
     I'm going to talk to my cardiologist on Monday about looking into other medication options or seeing how I respond to a lower dose. Hopefully, we'll be able to figure everything out soon and I'll be stable enough to go back to Nebraska in a few weeks!

With Love,
Elizabeth <3