What to do if you are not having a heart attack

I go to bed on Wednesday night feeling a little ehhh. Nothing specific, just ehhh. By morning, I am feeling a little more ehhh. I get the girls where they need to go, and the ehhh factor ramps up a notch. On my way to meet a friend at the coffee shop, I have the unpleasant realization that the ehhh is coming from my chest.

My chest is heavy. Not to be confused with my heavy bosoms, which are a very different breed of heavy. This ehhh is a bad, bad heavy. Very uncomfortable heavy. There is a bit of pain and when I try to figure out which way it’s going, I realize it’s going down my left arm.

But I don’t want to be rude, even if I am having a heart attack. My nice friend will be waiting for me at the coffee shop. So I make a pit stop at the pharmacy, where I seize a box of St. Joseph’s chewable 81mg aspirin tablets ($4.99) and an even larger box of E-Mer-Gen-C Heart Health black-cherry–flavored dissolving fizzy powder packets ($17.99) full of lycopene and other things I have never heard of. I am hoping my Fizzy Lifting Drink will end this episode of When Hearts Attack so I can enjoy a nice latte with my friend. I have a lot of work to do this week, and a heart attack would be terribly inconvenient.

I bolt from the pharmacy, sit on some steps, and tear into the aspirin, crunching down four. Then I hurry over to the coffee shop, trying to ignore the worsening ehhh and left arm pain.

“Are you getting something?” my friend wants to know.

I decide that if I am going to die, I should go down looking health-conscious. “I’ll have an herbal tea,” I say.

My friend looks at me strangely. I don’t want to alarm her, so I tell her I am just feeling dehydrated. Maybe I am dehydrated. I have seen dehydrated apple rings, and they are not all that far off from what my eye sockets and surrounding skin look like in the a.m.

I put my herbal tea on our table. Now I am positive I am dying, because I am having palpitations and it feels like an ape is sitting on my chest and my left arm is doing a very bad thing, its own version of the ehhh.

I ask my friend if she thinks I could be having a heart attack. She looks confused. All I have done is order an herbal tea instead of a latte, and it didn’t look all that taxing.

I show her the contents of my pharmacy bag and explain the ehhh to her. I have just spent nearly $25 on heart-attack prevention products. My friend is trying not to laugh. She is a very nice friend. I can tell that she wants to tell me that I am not having a heart attack, to cheer me up, but she is on the fence about the whole thing.

I get some water and dump two packets of Fizzy Heart Health into it and guzzle it down. “But enough about me,” I say.

Now we are both convinced I am having a heart attack, so she sends me to the doctor.

I do not like going to the doctor. But I do not want to be like my father, who really really really doesn’t like the doctor and avoided going to the doctor for twenty years, so I try to be brave even though I feel very stupid.

The receptionist says what receptionists say, which is, “Yes?” I want to say, “No,” and turn around and leave with my bad chest and bad arm and go die in the parking lot where people will not notice me until I have checked out completely and can’t see them pointing and staring at my bosoms, which I always imagine will fall out of my shirt at the exact moment of my death.

But instead I say, “Um, I know this is going to sound really dumb, but I’m having some strange chest discomfort, um, and my left arm hurts—”

She is on it. If you are in a bank, you say, Give me all your money in a bag. If you are in a doctor’s office, you say, Strange chest discomfort, left arm hurts and you will get pretty much the same effect.

She is tapping her keyboard frantically to see who can see me. I am hoping for one of the anonymous urgent-care doctors, who take anxious anonymous walk-ins.

“Your primary-care physician is in, and he can see you right now,” she says.

“Really?” I say. “Because I’m not picky.”

I have already seen my new primary-care physician three times in the past three and a half weeks, and we are not off to great start. This is all my fault, as at our first visit I was stammering and making too many stupid jokes and then forgot to tell him about some medication I was on and then remembered to tell him but by then I was blushing furiously and was sure I was coming across as dodgy and evasive and disturbed and so then tried a whole new round of stupid jokes. Throughout the whole debacle, my doctor leaned against the sink and studied me as if I were a rare and diseased Galapagos seal that someone found on a Berkshire ski slope.

A fourth visit in three and a half weeks with this man will not do wonders for my self-esteem or credibility. I consider slipping out the blood lab emergency exit but that would involve walking past phlebotomists and their evil blue rubber tourniquets, the sight of which brings me to my knees. So I sit still in the waiting room and will my heart to stop ehhhing. No go.

The nurse comes and whisks me to the exam room. She takes my blood pressure. Normal. She takes my pulse. I try not to pass out. I do not like people fondling my pulse. But it is normal. Then she tells me to take my shirt and bra off and put one of those slinky cotton-sheet robes on. She leaves. I put on the robe. Now I know I am going to die, because my bosoms are falling out. I shift gears and will my heart to give out quickly so I can get the hell out of Dodge before I can see the doctor and the nurse staring at my bazoombas.

Again, no go.

The nurse comes back and I have not died, so she is polite and tries not to look at my breasts as she sticks bits of poster-putty all over them and presses EKG wires into the little globs. The whole time she does this, I say things like Isn’t that interesting and I feel really stupid, would you feel stupid? and I can’t be the only person who came in here for something like this. She is kind and nods at whatever I say, a little too emphatically, as if I really am a rare and diseased Galapagos seal, but one who speaks English and is about to die a horrible painful death, and she wants to keep me as calm as possible.

The actual EKG takes all of three seconds, and she tells me I can put my clothes back on. She looks at the EKG printout, frowns, then says, I don’t read these, you know, but the doctor will talk to you about it and pushes the EKG machine from the room as if she is serving dim sum.

I am very very twitchy when my doctor arrives. I try not to make stupid jokes, and he makes this possible by cutting me off at the pass. “So what’s going on?” is what he says sternly as he’s walking in the room. I am grateful that he has left me no time for my special brand of small and insipid talk.

I tell him what is going on, about the ehhh in my chest and in my left arm.

He picks up the EKG readout and studies it. “This all looks fine. Except—” He squints at the printout. “—except the computer is telling me that you had a previous infarction.”

“The computer is telling you I had a heart attack? At one point? A heart attack that I missed?” This is novel, if disturbing, information.

He puts the paper down. “I don’t buy it. I think the computer is wrong on this one.”

“Really? Are we allowed to think that way?” I ask.

He ignores this and checks me out with his doctor kit. He asks some good questions about family members dropping dead at age 40, then tells me that, though he tends to be conservative about these things, he just doesn’t think I’ve got enough risk factors or symptoms to send me to the hospital.

I like this finding, because I like hospitals even less than I like doctors’ offices, but then he says, “Just go home and take a hot bath.”

When your doctor tells you to go home and take a hot bath, you know you are a raging hypochondriac. And the only thing to do as a raging hypochondriac in this situation is to deny being a raging hypochondriac. Which I do. Vehemently. “You know, I swear I’m not a hypochondriac. I’m normally very healthy. I don’t even like doctors. I mean, visiting doctors. I mean, I like you, but I don’t like, you know. What goes on here. I’m not a hypochondriac.”

He smiles cautiously. “Of course you’re not,” he says, then hurries from the room, leaving me with my heaving hypochondriac bosoms.

I slink past the receptionist, who looks a little disappointed that I did not die, and go to my car. I still feel very ehhh, and I am still convinced that death is imminent. In fact, now I want to die, just to prove to my doctor that I am not a hypochondriac. So I go to the food co-op because people there will notice if I drop dead, and I don’t even care about them seeing my bosoms, because they wear Birkenstocks and have magnetic peace signs on their cars, and I feel safe with them.

But I keep on living, so I wind up buying $105 of organic bok choy in case I continue to keep on living when I get home and need to feel like I’ve made a lifestyle change.

I am afraid to die at home, because it will scare the dogs and the children, so I stall by taking my bok choy to the paint store. I peruse yellows and rub my left arm. Periodically, I slap my sternum, sort of a Junior Varsity CPR move to keep things ticking in there.

As I buy some Benjamin Moore paint samples, I wonder if I should position myself to pass out forward, onto the counter, or backwards, more dramatically, into the paint roller display. I aim for the counter, less mess for everyone.

But we seal the deal at the cash register with no death on my part.

When I get home, I am still alive. I am going to have to switch primary-care doctors.

When David gets home later, I am up on the stepladder, swabbing Weston Flax and Windham Cream on the wall above the blue cabinets and holding on to the ladder with my aching left arm. My heart likes the Weston Flax better, but my arm is telling me to go for the Windham Cream.

“What did the doctor say?” David wants to know.

“He told me to take a bath,” I say.

But today I’m pretty sure I have glaucoma.

52 comments March 3rd, 2006