Heartbreak

So a little over a week ago I was sitting at my desk, minding my own business, when my body decided it was bored and tried to liven things up a bit. I developed chest pains and had trouble breathing. And I did what any self-respecting person would do and just ignored it. The pain eventually subsided but the tight feeling in my chest didn't. After a few days of this I decided to seek the opinion of a medical professional and went to a clinic for a checkup. They did an ECG and immediately declared that I had to go to hospital. Seeing as I was upright and breathing I considered this overkill, but they were adamant.

On arrival at the hospital I spent 45 minutes checking in. This was mostly due to the reception desk being unable to reach my medical aid. While I was sitting in reception waiting for someone at my medical aid to notice the ringing phone, I wondered what they would have done had it been an actual emergency. Would they have tried to keep me alive while still waiting for someone to answer? After quite some time I was told that my medical aid had finally realized that the ringing sound wasn't in their ears and answered the phone. I was told to report to the cardiology ICU ward. There the nurses tried to figure out why I was there, as I was younger than all the other patients in the ward by at least 40 years. Eventually they told me to strip down and handed me one of those hospital gowns where your butt is on display for everyone to see and stuck me in a hospital bed.

A myriad of ECG, blood pressure tests and blood tests followed. They were drawing so much blood that I was wondering if I would have any left. When my test results finally came back I was told that everything looked okay but I was being held overnight for monitoring. I spent the night hooked up to a blood pressure machine, an oxygen monitoring system and a drip. They had to spend 5 minutes disconnecting me every time I went to the bathroom. I really started feeling like someone in a white coat with wild hair was going to try and conduct electricity into me while yelling "It's alive! IT'S ALIVE!" Thankfully I was discharged on the condition that I be back a few days later for an angiogram.

For those who don't know, an angiogram is where they make an incision in your groin, right next to your old chap, and then thread a piece of wire up a major artery and into your heart. I suspect the surgeon just secretly likes to see you with your pants down. The angiogram itself was quite painful. It felt like they were trying to shove a firehose into my body. Thankfully it didn't last very long but then I was told not to move for 4 hours lest I rupture my tortured artery and bleed to death. Very comforting thought!

The end result of this whole thing is that I am actually fine. They've done every blood test they could think of, and a few that I am pretty sure they made up on the spot, and they have declared me healthy. The problem turned out to be the way that my heart conducts electricity. If I knew that beforehand I might have just saved myself a lot of trouble and hired an electrician!