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TIFU By drinking a cup of coffee that sent me to the hospital

Obligatory "this happened a few months ago" but I was only reminded about it today. TLDR at the end.

First, a bit of background. I'm a pretty avid coffee drinker, beyond just having my normal cup of coffee each morning I like to rotate through different coffee beans I find to try them out, often looking for the ones that brew stronger tasting coffee since I like a dark black brew. I generally only drink a single cup each day, since I find when I drink more than that, the amount of caffeine makes me feel uncomfortable (so I also usually avoid energy drinks like 5-hour).

Separate from my coffee habits, a number of years ago I had to get an ECG/general exam following an indirect lightning strike incident (separate story) which uncovered a murmur and abnormal heartbeat pattern. Something my doctor said was nothing to worry about right now, but to be aware that it could possibly be an issue later in life.

Fast forward to when the fuck up occurred, I'm browsing coffee beans at a local store, and come across a coffee marketed as 'The Worlds Strongest Coffee'. Idiot me assumes they are referring to flavour and doesn't consider that they actually mean caffeine content (maybe the 'Death Wish Coffee' brand should have tipped me off). Anyways, I decide to buy a bag and try it out, but since I have other beans I'm enjoying at home this bag sits on my counter unnoticed for several more weeks. Finally, when I run out of other beans, I absent-mindedly brew a cup of it the same way I normally do with other beans. It turns out strong, but otherwise, nothing special to note.

Now the second part of the fuck up, I'm laying on the couch watching TV that night, having completely forgotten about the coffee, and I can feel my heart just going absolutely bonkers inside my chest. It feels like every few beats it's rolling over inside my chest, skipping a beat completely, or doing these super-powerful pumps that feel like someone giving me a solid push in the chest. I'm a little worried at this point, but figure I'll keep a close eye on it for the next few hours to see if it gets any worse, and be ready to take action if it does. It doesn't, so I decide I'll go to bed and see how it feels in the morning.

I wake up the next morning, and my heart still feels like it's going nuts, so I decide I'll call the urgent care near me to get a recommendation, to which they advise me to come in the same day to be seen. Now at this point, the idea that the caffeine in the coffee I drank the day before could be causing this is way out of my mind, because I've never had caffeine stick around in my body more than a few hours. So I head down to the urgent care, get checked in, and tell the nurse what I've been feeling. The nurse immediately pulls in an ECG machine and starts hooking me up without asking many more questions, pulls a bunch of vitals, and then leaves to go get the doctor.

Once the doctor comes in, he finally starts asking a bunch of questions to figure out what might be causing it, initially with the basics like 'do you do any drugs like cocaine?' but eventually escalating all the way to things like 'do you trust the people you live with, do we need to get the police involved because someones spiking your food/drink at home?'. He insists I get a set of bloodwork done to make sure there isn't something crazy that shows up there I'm not thinking about. Finally, after all that, he mentions as an aside that if I've drunk any 'particularly strong caffeinated drinks' recently, that could also be the cause. It's at this point I realize just how much I fucked up, because now I remember the coffee from the other day, and immediately realize that must be what caused this. I feel like an idiot, because I've undergone all these intense tests and questioning, and used up this doctors time, all because of my extra strong cup of Joe.

TL:DR: I mistook a racing heart from caffeine as bad heart palpitations and now have a $742 hospital bill from all the tests they ran because of it.

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