Debbie Does Drivel

My heart wakes me every night.
About two hours after I drift off to sleep, I wake up suddenly, needing (but failing) to catch my breath, my heart rate through the roof.
This happens every single evening.
Not wanting to keep Kev up with my deep gasping choking attempts at air, I wander into the living room and try to regain my breath to the soft soothing sounds of David Letterman or Conan or the Abflex infomercial.
Sometimes I flip the computer on, initiating a search for "why am I dying?"

Maybe I'm in deep REM sleep before snapped into consciousness, dreaming some horrible thing which I forget instantly.
Perhaps I'm burying something awful in my subconscious that plays itself out via my anxious physical reaction.
(But I know from panic attacks and this doesn't fit the bill.) (Though, I did hear I've stuffed the memory of a particularly horrible plane ride from years ago...don't remember a thing about it or even taking the trip, yet the anxiety from it lingers.)
Or, could be I really am dying. Some myocarditis. Freakish pulse anomaly. Arrythmia.

Truly, I don't feel particularly panicky about anything -- any more so than my normal baseline hyper-anxiety -- so what's happening?

To boot, when I wake up in the middle of the night, I see things I wish I didn't.
Like, a few nights ago, when I traveled to the kitchen for some water, I spied an enormously chubby cockroach on the floor. Its girth exceeded your wildest imaginings. It knew I saw it, and that it was moments away from losing all its girth, when it tried to squeeze itself through a crack under the door. It so desperately attempted to push itself under the door jamb with these nervous sidelong glances at me, that I took instant pity on the thing. I let it live, bottom half poking from under the door, wedged halfway between dimensions.

That thing embodied my psyche. It as if we were one.
Except for the girth part.