False alarms and not so fun experiences.

Well it was an oh so enjoyable week.

Let's start it out by saying for the past two weeks or so I've been noticing some pain. Not just any pain mind you. Pain in the left side of my chest, radiating pain in my left arm, pain in my left jaw.... Hmmm, 1+1+1=3 last I looked.

I tried telling myself, it will stop hurting when the pain goes away, (gee, just where did I hear that before?)

Unfortunately when that type of pain goes away other things go away, namely ME.. Vicky and the monkeys didn't think that a very good idea for obvious reasons.

Well last Monday afternoon/evening it was bad enough that I couldn't ignore it anymore. I finally consented to be drug kicking and screaming into the social morass that is the local emergency room. Generally walking in and saying the magic phrase, "I'm having chest pains" is a way to get fast tracked treatment. Not that night however. Vicky gave some thought to shouting, "Look! La Migra!" but decided not to.

It was such a fun experience, being wired for sound, all twelve leads, a pulse/oxygen monitor on my finger, an oxygen cannula in my nose, lots of blood work, poking, prodding, and other annoying behavior of the medical persuasion. I think the worst though was the %#%!^#$ EKG monitor. They set it to alarm if my pulse fell below 50 BPM. Gee guess what? My resting pulse rate is below 50. That meant every time I fell asleep the very loud klaxon alarm that was about 24" from my head went off. That was generally enough to levitate me out of bed, raise my pulse rate by about 30 BPM and cause me to let loose a string of colorful language. That made for a VERY LONG night.

Fortunately the EKG trace came back relatively normal. There were just these odd rhythms about every 10 minutes throughout the night they were puzzled about till I explained the EKG monitor issue. All blood work came back normal also. The local on call cardiologist came by for a brief consult and decided to set up a stress test for Thursday morning.

Wednesday afternoon the cardiologist decided to change the stress test to an angiogram. I'd been having some fairly severe jaw pain on Wednesday and he decided to go straight to the angiogram. He tried talking me into overnighting in the hospital but after my incident with the EKG machine from Hell I wanted no part of that.

Only having a couple of hours to google and read up on angiograms Wednesday evening was rather eye opening. The plus side was that if they did find issues they could be fixed then and there, kind of one stop shopping I guess.

Thursday morning found me full of happy juice on a table in a room full of "American Idol" fans. Have I ever mentioned just how worthless I think that show is? How much I despise it? What I think of people's intellectual abilities who actually like that mindless drivel? And here I was hoping and praying they could perform something as complex as an angiogram. I really shouldn't have worried though, they were good, real good.

Final results showed that I passed the test. My heart, yes I do have one, came back clean. No blockages, no problems, no issues.

Needless to say, Vicky was more than a little relieved, (although she had been looking at a lot of expensive guns lately...) Just kidding!