Scary Day

Okay, so it's been a while since I posted.  Life has been insanely busy. 

On Saturday, *B* and I went to a flower mart that a neighboring town hosts every year.  There's always good food, so we had lunch while we were there.  *B* and I split a virgin pina colada. 

I'm usually pretty picky about what kind of frozen drinks I have.  Slurpees (and pretty much all drinks that come out of the rotating vats like Slurpees) have really messed with my heart in the past.  In college, I went to the ER because I had palpitations for 6 hours after drinking a small diet Pepsi Slurpee.  But I heard the guy using a blender, so I figured he had a bottle of mixer (which has never hurt me in the past).  It occurred to me later when I thought back to the drink stand that the fluid in the drink did come out of one of those vats.

At the end of the drink, my heart went haywire.  It was so erratic that I couldn't get a pulse to read on my heart rate app.  The beats were fast, slow, big, small, and generally crazy.  Of course, then I started freaking out because I was afraid of hurting the baby.  So my pulse and blood pressure increased. 

My heart rate was up for almost an hour and a half.  Thankfully, it came down.  If it had been up for 20 more minutes, I would have had to go to the hospital.  I don't even want to think of what they'd do to me there.  I would imagine they'd recommend induction (which I emphatically don't want).  I've tried doing research over the years about this issue (palpitations and Slurpees) but I haven't found any medical data, only anecdotal evidence.  When I was in college, the cardiologist just shrugged and said "so don't drink them anymore." 

It really worries me that we feed our children these drinks when they can have such drastic health implications.  Any thoughts on what the specific trigger mechanism is for this reaction?