I'm not dying any faster than usual...

For the past six weeks I've been having chest pains. This past week, they've been pretty bad ones, at times flaring up to take my breath away. Yeah, you're all panicking now, aren't ya? Go re-read the subject before you do.

So I went to the doctor and had a whole bunch of tests done. I take five flights of stairs every day regularly, I walk a mile uphill from the parking lot to work on those days when I do drive, and I've otherwise been in great physical shape. I don't exercise enough otherwise, but that's just life.

I remember when having an EKG done meant being hooked up to a big cart and having all this nasty gel on your body. Nowadays, they put a whole bunch of what look like 3M skin-friendly PostItNotes on your anatomy, connect a lead to each tab, and then stick the other end of the wire into a USB port on the same desktop computer where they do data entry, and call up the program "EKG". Cool! I was biologically hooked up to teh intarweb! "Yeah, we'll email the results to a cardiologist to be sure," said the doc, "but these results look fine." She calls up another screen. "You blood pressure is very good, And your cholesterol level is great."

I celebrated that last piece of news by having a bleu cheese and onion burger, medium-rare, for lunch. Work bought.

I have something called persistent costochondritis, a nasty arthritis-like inflammation of the cartilage lining my sternum. It's not dangerous or life-threatening, and it (thankfully!) doesn't indicate that I have a tendency toward other forms of arthritis. It could mask a heart attack someday, so I'll be doing annual EKGs from now on.

And the advice? "Take two aspirin when it bothers you."

Bleah.