OK, panic attack or asthma attack or maybe, god forbid, heart.

Have you had panic attacks or asthma attacks like this before?

quester,

sounds like you might have high blood pressure. can you go in for a check on that? Is that at least covered? I would prioritize that while you continue to see what options you have for your tooth.

I've had panic attacks before, but they usually don't last more than a week. I thought this was related to a cold I had and the cough I developed but it has persisted and that has me a little worried.

le nubian, I'm thinking about going to urgent care after work tomorrow - I can't afford to miss any more days - and see if they think it's a problem.

yes. in the meantime, many drugstores have blood pressure monitors that you can check if you would like to.

Be warned that store cuffs have often had kids playing with them to the point that they're unreliable, though I'm not sure which way it would be unreliable. My clinic will test blood pressure on a walk-in basis, if there's somewhere you can pop into on the way to work.

The urgent care place my insurance lists is all the way in the other direction from work, so I'm gong after work.

Quester, I hope it is nothing, but going to urgent care tomorrow is probably a good idea.

I just saw someone on facebook spell wrought iron as rawt iron. I think I need to be done with facebook for the night.

I am glad you are going to urgent care, quester. It sounds like high blood pressure to me too.

Hubby has a PET scan tomorrow to see how treatment is going. Symptoms suggest the cancer is fighting back, and since he's tolerating things so "well" they may go for the more aggressive treatment they wanted to do but were afraid to because of his heart. As his cardiologist said, "Hm, fight the cancer now or increase the chances of causing a heart problem I can deal with easily. Get the tougher treatment."

But Hubby is anxious tonight. He copes by investigating what mantle cell lymphoma does, so he's deep in survival rates and odds of it being beaten back and likelihoods of it coming back and how untreatable it will be if it does return. So he's talking about life insurance--a little late in the game to get anything we can afford, I imagine--and he's apologizing for putting me through this and all that.

Not my coping method. I was happily in a state of "he's coping with the treatments well, the doctors are cautiously optimistic, we can do this." I feel like a coward in denial, but I need to be on a little more blindly optimistic train for a while.

Turns out nearly all patients with mantle cell lymphoma have two misplaced chromosomes. He's going to tell his siblings and his daughter to consider getting the blood test to check this. He has a son out there somewhere who I hope doesn't get a genetic surprise one day.