Wow. Something really new and meaningful to write about - my wake up call. 3/30/12 @ 0430. Something really wasn't right. No pain, no shortness of breath, no diaphoresis, no pressure: just waxing and waning waves of "fullness", like a balloon was inflating and deflating in my upper chest, BOTH shoulders and BOTH sides of my neck. Normal heart rate (84), normal respirations (14) and a BP of 124/82. After an hour of increasing "fullness" sensations, "we" decided it was getting worse instead of going away so Shel drove me to the ER. After six hours of equivocal tests, two normal'ish (non-diagnostic) ECGs, 10mg of Morphine that had me feeling good enough to want to go home, nothing more scientific than a nagging doubt in the consciousness of the ER doc that put me on the Telemetry Unit for observation, and finally a second Troponin (a cardiac specific enzyme) level that definitively spiked, the diagnosis was made. It was definitely a heart attack. I was oddly relieved because I sure didn't want to cause all this fuss over a panic attack - which was on the list of working diagnoses. The calls went out and Jess and Scott immediately started north from Boulder and Alex was located and started east from Bozeman. An hour later I was in the cath lab in the competent hands of one Ed Dean, M.D. An angiogram showed two blocked coronary arteries. For you medical types the First Diagonal off the LAD was 80% occluded and the Circumflex was 99% occluded (often considered a "widow maker"). Since I was resting comfortably under the influence of some great narcotics, my family on hand (Shel, Mom, Bill) was called in for a briefing by the cardiologist and "we" rightly decided I wanted a couple of stents. Lots of TLC, patience, and education by a great nursing staff, acclimation to three new drugs (for at least the next year), much familial fretting ultimately replaced by relief, and two days later I was sent home (with what would ultimately amount to about $75,000 in medical bills) feeling so good that two days after that I was (wrongly) working on a tile job we had started in the entryway, hall, front bathroom and laundry room. Something about having all that extra blood flowing into the arteries that feed your heart muscle makes a guy feel pretty good. All of that turns out to be the easy part of this journey. The hard part and the topic of many future posts, is learning to accept the reality that A) despite doing everything right I had a heart attack, and B) that I'm not 35 anymore and NOT able to do any damn thing I want - physically.