Cardiomyopathy means your heart isn’t working as well as it should, and based on what you’ve described it could be related to a past heart attack that was “silent” (i.e. you didn’t have any symptoms at the time). Your chest pains, blood pressure drops, and fast heart rates could all be related to a weak heart, and they can also be caused by certain medications for heart failure. Sometimes a weak heart can let fluid build up in the lungs. Small muscles surrounding the blood vessels in the lungs squeeze harder in response to the high fluid. This causes the muscle to get thicker and stronger, but leads to high pressure in the blood vessels of the lungs—the condition called pulmonary hypertension. The already weakened heart can then get worse from trying to pump blood against high pressure in the blood vessels of the lungs.  It is your decision whether to seek care in or out of the VA system, and the doctor may have been making a note of this in order to access your medical records from the VA system. Your condition sounds a bit complex and you should definitely be under the care of a cardiologist—particularly one that you trust.