Why is my body falling apart at 38?

nobody@vox.com(jprall) — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 21:39:15 -0700

So I wake up early this morning, do my thing, but I feel little tightness in my chest.

An hour or so goes by, and now this isn't just tightness, now I've got crazy sharp pains. Shooting pains toward my shoulder, up into my neck and it f__in hurts to breathe.

Based on my recent hospital stay for SVT's, I thought for sure this was gonna be it and I was having a full blown heart attack. Needless to say, this was pretty much the worst part of the day.

Then I weigh the odds, trying to make a decision on what to do and how to do it. I had convinced myself I was in trouble but for now it was just a lot of pain, not feeling light headed or anything. So I take Steve Dinan's incredibly fast Dinan 5 (juiced up BMW 545) and I haul ass from cupertino to good sam in los gatos. I also make a call to Aimee to tell her "I think I'm having a heart attack, how's your day going?"

I arrive (woot!) to the emergency room at Good Sam and the triage nurse took one look at me and let me skip to the head of line and got people working on me asap.

I now know this routine pretty well. 4 or 5 people descend on you immediately. The manage to somehow put an IV in, take blood samples for tests, give me asprin, nitroglycerine(!), an EKG, and of course, extract my insurance info all in 5 minutes. These guys thought i was having a heart attack too.

Then I get wheeled off to X-Ray for my chest and I said, "I can try to stand if you need me to" and she said, "Uh, you look awfully pale, let's keep you in bed." Cool, more reassurance.

Then I make it back to the ER and I wait for an hour. They were keeping the heart monitor on, but they were really waiting for the blood tests to come back.

Turns out that when you have a heart attack, some enzyme or something like that gets into your bloodstream.

Doc finally comes back and says, "well it's not your heart, but we don't know what it is yet either." Cool, more reassurance.

I stay in the ER and after complaining about the pain and clearly since I hadn't died yet because of a heart attack, they were quite accomodating with pain meds. That makes for reading through email on a treo much more difficult.

6 hours later, after they had taken an additional set of blood tests, they come back and say, "It's not totally confirmed, but we are pretty sure you have pleurisy." Thinking in my head, "I'm a dude, I dont have a pleurisy."

Treo and Internet to the rescue. Turns out Pleurisy is "is an inflammation of the pleura, which is the moist, double-layered membrane that surrounds the lungs and lines the rib cage." Cool, yet more reassurance! But, hey it's been 6 hours and I'm still alive, so that's all good.

So Google up Pleurisy if you want to learn more about it. At home tonight, feeling ok, but still hurts to breathe.

Other than that Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?

Fun times

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Why is my body falling apart at 38?