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| Monday, April 2, 2007 |
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Paperless paper 
Selves explanatory
| | I'll have something to add, but not until I get real work out of the way. Meanwhile, draw (or redraw) your own conclusions. |
No ticker shock
| | Since about the middle of last week I've had a mysterious pain in my neck — kind of a steady burning thing, roughly in line with the vein that runs from collar to ear, spreading toward the chin. Pressing on it made no difference, nor turning my head this way or that. So it wasn't a muscle pull or... well, I didn't know. Or care, for that matter, until yesterday morning, when I was standing in church, getting dizzy and feeling a bit of nausea. |
| | Later I shared this with a friend of mine who is a critical care nurse, and she urged me to go in and have it checked. Few heart attacks are sudden, she said. Most have warning signs. I had several. Since I'm 59 — a year older than my father when he had his first heart attack — I had more than enough reason to be Concerned. |
| | As it happened this was at about 1pm in Santa Barbara, and I was due to take a redeye to Boston and spend the next night at the house of she and her husband in rural Massachusetts, after watching The Game at their place. My flight out of SBA was at 8:30pm, and I didn't want to miss it. But she said I'd probably make my plane if I went in right away. If I really was having heart problems, I wouldn't be flying in any case. |
| | So I went in. Thanks to living in a small city, another nurse friend spotted me walking in and expedited a checking-out. Not long after that I was laying on a bed with wires attached to buttons all over my thorax, oxygen prongs up my nose and a tube running out of a vein in my arm. Over the next several hours I was put through a series of tests, incluidng one where they injected a radioactive substance into my bloodstream so they could shoot pictures with a "gamma camera" of circulation in my heart before and after a treadmill stress test. |
| | Turns out my heart is just fine. After a lifetime as a desk potato with bad eating habits, I still have a resting pulse of 60, low blood pressure, low cholesterol, and an EKG that looks the same when my heart is pounding at twice the resting rate. Circulation to my heart is fine. No blockages, nothing suspicious. My heart presents an ironically athletic profile. Go figure. |
| | Still no clue what the neck thing is. One doctor suspects it's pain referred from some old cervical injuries, and nothing new or worth worrying about, although they didn't shut the door on the possibility it might still be something Bad but not heart-related. But I'm not worried. It's still there, and no worse. |
| | So now I'm at the Berkman Center, just starting to catch up on stuff. And feeling pretty good, considering. |
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