The Pectus Chronicles (Part 1)
I am 21 years old and I just learned that I have Pectus Excavatum. I went to a routine physical exam with my Primary Care Physician in early July and, when listening to my heart, she casually mentions that I have a heart murmur but it’s probably just due to my “Pectus Excavatum”.
I have never even heard this term, let alone been diagnosed. I didn’t even know there was something wrong with my chest. I knew I had an uneven ribcage, that was something I had always pointed out to my doctors and they just checked me for scoliosis and said I had nothing to worry about. To be fair, I moved several times growing up, so I switched doctors when it was likely developing during puberty. I have also grown up in a conservative environment, so few people ever saw me change and I did not wear lower-cut tops which would have drawn attention to it.
Sometime after I started college, I began to notice some difficulty walking around campus, climbing stairs, and normal base-level amounts of physical activity as it related to my breathing. I told my Primary Doctor and she prescribed me an inhaler, assuming it was a classic case of exercise-induced asthma. This condition seemed to be getting worse and the inhaler didn’t seem to do anything to help. Of course, I had convinced myself that I probably didn’t even have asthma since the inhaler didn’t help. I have never been very athletic and had only tried (and failed) to start exercising after I entered college, so I assumed I just had a low tolerance for physical activity that was due to my sedentary lifestyle and lack of commitment to pushing through to fix this.
I found myself looking into Pectus Excavatum for myself immediately after my checkup out of disbelief that I had some actual condition that I knew nothing of. It’s funny how your reality really is what you make of it, because I found that I had just about the entire list of symptoms, but I had never put it together. The exercise intolerance, shortness of breath from walking from my bedroom to the living room, pains in the upper portion of the side of my ribcage that flares out, rapid heart beats when I’m doing light activity or even just sitting down, and dizziness/lightheadedness from bending down or standing up to where my vision would momentarily black out. All of these things were just little quirks that I thought were common living pains for most people or, at worst, for those who aren’t very active.
The next step was to follow up with a cardiologist for an echocardiogram, so my doctor could check on my heart murmur.
