My heart attack story, Part 1 - the chest pain

 It's been a busy year. I have been working seven days a week since the early spring, usually from 10AM until well after midnight, generally getting to bed around 2-3AM then doing it all over again the next day.

Since the spring, I think I have had maybe three "days off" which usually had to do with some family commitment. This all adds up to me being very much behind on all of my own personal projects and tasks. Tasks like hauling stuff to the dump, but first putting the muffler back on the old Ford van because it fell off when an exhaust bracket rusted through.

The van has an agriculture plate on it, which exempts it from being respectable in every way and roadworthy in most ways. Under the law, it needs a white light in the front, a red light in the back, a brake system, an exhaust (which is vaguely worded in the law on purpose) and a steering wheel. The fact that the law says it must have a steering wheel intrigues me and you know it was added to the law because someone like me was driving a shitbox truck with just a pair of vise grips and some lawmaker decided to add "steering wheel" to the requirements.

So anyway, there I was laying under the van, driving the muffler back onto the intermediate pipe with a little sledge hammer and all of a sudden I got a weird pain at my lower right rib cage. Damn, I thought...must have moved the wrong way and cracked a floating rib...and kept working because that's what I do.

I got the muffler back on, cranked down the clamp as much as my impact wrench would squish it, and jury-rigged some hangers to hold the tailpipe in place. Done. Still had the pain though, and it had moved to my right shoulder blade.

Then I loaded up the van and made a couple of dump runs, as all of the trash barrels were full. Still hurting.

Then my next plan was to head out to the range with the big chain saw and start dropping some trees that need to be cleared in order to start working on the new museum building out there. Couldn't shake the pain though. Tried stretching, laying flat on the floor, cracking things, nothing seemed to change it.

Maybe it was a weird gas bubble? Nope. Couldn't get it to move.

It occurred to me that maybe it was something important that a doctor should check out. There were no other symptoms. No nausea, no lightheadedness, no tingling or numbness anywhere, no shortness of breath, none of the classic heart attack symptoms.

Am I just being silly? Won't I feel like an idiot if I get to the walk-in center and this turns out to be a big 'ol fart stuck in the horizontal part of my colon? It's a weird pain though, so maybe I should just swallow my pride and go.

So I did.

I went out to the van, dressed in the my grubby "work on the van and go to the dump" clothes, complete with rust flakes from the van in my hair. I was a bit concerned & distracted by then. Didn't even change my shoes from my indoor shoes to my outdoor shoes and didn't even stick a pistol in my belt (I never leave the house unarmed, it's a way of life). I told Sammy the dog that she is a good girl and to keep an eye on the chickens, and left.

As I drove, the pain seemed to spread and intensify. I knew on a certain level that this could be a pretty bad thing.

The closest urgent care facility that is open on a Saturday afternoon is 15 miles away so that is where I headed.

On the way, it occurred to me that this is quite possibly a heart attack despite the lack of symptoms beyond the weird chest pain and I wondered if this scenery I was seeing as I drove was my last look at the world, so I committed as much of it to memory as I could.

One of the things that I saw as I drove through Claremont, the city to the north of here where the hospital is located, was their little Christmas display on the town common. There were three white wire reindeer statues, a buck a doe and a fawn. The buck had fallen over and was laying on the ground. This made me pretty sad.

I wondered if my wife would be able to figure out all of the paperwork I would be leaving behind and if she would know what stuff from my gun collection, book collection etc would be the stuff to sell to make mortgage payments to get her through until she could figure out how to make ends meet with the family bread-earner gone. I wondered if she could safely figure out how to drive the tractor to plow the driveway when it snowed. There wasn't anything I could do about those things because I had a full plate just staying alive long enough to reach the hospital.

A sense of urgency set in and it seemed like traffic wasn't taking this moment seriously and moving fast enough. I got stuck behind a little orange and silver car at a red light. Two thoughts went through my mind rapidly.

One was that in the movies, when someone has a heart attack, they clutch their chest then keel over and die. I didn't want that to happen while I was at the wheel of a 10,000GVW bigassed shitbox van that would no doubt go careening across 4 lanes of traffic and kill bystanders, so I kept my right hand on the shifter in case I DID feel the big squeeze so I could throw it in park.

The other thought was that maybe I should just turn to the left and drive over the median to go around the stopped traffic since there was no traffic going the other way. Right when I decided it was probably the best course of action, the light turned green and I was on the way to the hospital and theoretical safety again. At that point, I was still maybe a half mile to a mile away. It was starting to seem pretty desperate.

A couple of minutes later I pulled in and parked at the walk-in center. I had the presence of mind to lock the van as I left it in a parking space and went in. The lady asked how they could help me and if I had been there before. I told her I was having chest pains. She said that they didn't handle that stuff there, but I COULD DRIVE TO THE EMERGENCY ROOM, IT IS JUST AROUND THE CORNER.

Yes, the lady told the guy who was having a heart attack to DRIVE himself around the block to the ER.

I chose not to drive, I knew where the new ER entrance was and figured I could walk there faster than screwing around and finding a new parking spot. So I did.

That story will be continued in the next post because this one is already too long.

(spoiler alert: I lived!)