HEART ACHES, HEART ACHES.

Blog number 530 ******** 08 October 2011

So.

A few weeks ago.

On a weekend.

Late at night.

I got a minor chest pain.

I took a nitro pill, but it didn't help. I took another one. No help. A doctor once told me that if I ever got a chest pain, to sit down and rest. If that didn't help, to take a nitro. If no help, take another one. If still no help, take another. If the third one didn't help, scurry over to emergency room.

Two pills didn't help, I thought I'd skip taking the third one, so I told my wife what was happening and that I thought we had better go to the emergency room. On the way there, I started feeling much better, so I said we might as well turn around and go home. So we did. Got home, pain started again so I took another nitro. No help. Took another one. No help. Told wife we might as well go to emergency room. So we did. Wound up staying in hospital a few days.

Found out later by studying the directions on the nitro bottle that the pills had to be kept cool and they had an expiration date for about a year before. Aha! Nitro pills no good. They had turned into placebos. Placebos never have worked on me. Something to do with my body chemistry, I suppose. Yeah, I know. I know. Schizophrenic joking - my forte.

Heart doctor wanted to call in a specialist that he called an "electrician." Electrician gave me a ten second electrocardiogram, said I had a portion of my heart that was triggering a beat of my heart that showed up as a spike on the electrocardiogram tape, followed by a period of flat line. I asked him if this period of flatness combined with stress or activity could have caused the chest pains. He said, "likely."

Look at me! A medical diagnoser!

He said what we could do is cauterize that part of my heart that was triggering an erroneous beat. So in three days I am going to Phoenix to have this happen. It will be an out-patient procedure, taking about six hours which includes three hours waiting for blood to clot from an incision in my groin where they run the "cauterize" up a vein to my heart. Sounds like fun.