Funny story, but not from today or yesterday. This goes back to about 2000 and beyond.
Back to the 1940s, my father (then a teenager) went to his doctor for twitches in single muscle fibers, i.e. not the full muscle, not a gross motor activity, but just a twitchy pulse in a very small area that's felt more than seen. The usual diagnosis for this (at least at the time) was calcium deficiency. He took a calcium supplement and the the twitches went away, but soon came back, worse than before. They progressed to painful cramps. He reasoned as follows: calcium and magnesium are adjacent alkali earths, and there many circumstances in which they chemically behave similarly. It seemed possible that one could substitute for the other in neuromuscular activity, but as excess calcium is eliminated one could lose baby magnesium with the calcium bath water, making the original problem worse. Whether his reasoning was correct or not, a magnesium supplement corrected problem, and he needed to take a milk of magnesia pill every now and then for the rest of his life. At least one of his twin sisters developed the same twitches, and responded to the same treatment.
Jump forward forty years, I'm a teenager, and I start having the same twitches, I know my father's story, I take magnesium, and all is well.
About the same time (a few years earlier actually) I started having occasional heart palpitations. (I promise, this is all connected.) These occur so rarely (about once every couple of months or so on average) that I wasn't able to observe any pattern. When I finally remembered to bring it up with my doctor, he did an EKG and deemed it normal (which I later learned could not have been true, but that's another story) and he called it supraventricular tachycardia, and told me it's nothing to worry about unless it gets worse (which it did, a lot, several years later, but that's the same other story).
Actually, the other story is tied in, so here's the short short version: I had Wolfe Parkinson White syndrome, it was corrected by cardiac catheter ablation, and was told to expect the old, rare tachycardia to continue as before.
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Now we've reached 2000 or so. One evening, while driving home from my sister in law's, I began to have what felt like the same old palpitations, but every minute or less. I pulled over so my wife could take over driving, and we went to the emergency room. There I had an EKG and some blood work, and was left to rest for a couple of hours on a monitor. Finally I was told "Yup, you're having palpitations. You're not about to have a heart attack, go home."
The next morning, with the very frequent palpitations still going on, I began to have the familiar muscle fiber twitches. I took some magnesium, as usual. Within an hour, the twitches stopped,
and so did the palpitations. (I told you it was connected.) Ever since then, I take the magnesium whenever the twitches start, or if I have palpitations twice within a week. No more problem.
ruined my hole friggin day
