Finks

No, I'm not talking about my Grandma Lawrence's relatives. I'm talking about something Teddy has been complaining about off & on for the past 3 years & that has surfaced again.

Back when he was in kindergarten he came up to me one day & told me he was "having a fink." Not knowing what this meant, I asked & he told me it felt funny "there" & pointed at his chest. He said it was going too fast. I put my hand on his chest & yes, it did seem like his heart was racing, even though he hadn't been doing anything at all previous. Alan & I talked about it that night, but it didn't seem too worrisome at the time. By that weekend, though, he'd complained about it several more times so we took him to the ER at St. John's to see what was up. They took his vitals & said everything looked fine, but they fitted him with a holter monitor just to see what it would show. Teddy wore it for 24 hours, & every time he had a "fink" I noted it on the journal that came with it.

Long story short, everything came back fine. He's talked about having finks since then very randomly & not very often. Until this past week.

He's been talking about finks again, & this time they're more common. He claims he's having them all the time now, almost constantly. I really thought that he was just aware of his pulse & was noticing that until yesterday.

He & I were walking out the front door to go up to the street behind us so he could play with the kids that live up there, when he stopped going down the front stairs. He got very panicked & pale, held on to both banisters, & said he was having a fink again. He said he couldn't go down the stairs, he was too scared. We went back inside & after he calmed down a little we got ready to go again. He refused to go out the front door so we went out the side door instead & he slowly went down the hill our house is on by walking diagonally across the neighbor's front lawn.

This is really weird for Teddy, who can run full speed down steep inclines like it's nothing & has been doing so since he was less than 2. I don't know what to make of it.

I'm scared it's a new kind of seizure, I guess that's my biggest worry. There is a kind called autonomic seizures & they basically effect your body's normal mechanisms, like heart rate, breathing, digestion. I don't know how we could test for it (other than another EEG) or what could be done for it. I've alerted the school nurse, & I guess I'll have to get him to the pediatrician too. I just get worried we're making a big deal out of nothing, but heart stuff is scary. And his heart rate is high when he has these.

We shall see.