Sage Counsel

I'll try not to build this up, but last night something happened that I want to get across - if not because of its implications, then because of what happened to me.

I've never had an ECG before. I know what it stands for; 'Electro-cardio Graph', and that was just another piece of Pub Quiz Trivia until last night.

I've been having chest pains for the last five or six days now, left hand side, near the top. You know. Where the heart is. I've been incredibly aware of my heartbeat. It seemed very...strong. Whether that was psychological or not I wasn't in a position to judge. I was scared. I mean, I've really thrown some stuff at my body over the last six years. Caffeine has risen from a nice kick in the morning to a vice, I was no teetotaller at university, the year after graduation I was broke but managed to afford regular nights on various tiles, and since taking this job I have been able to relax with a bottle of wine or so whenever I have felt the urge...

I'm twenty four years old, so it is highly unlikely that I am about to keel over with a heart attack, right?

This is something you can only tell yourself so many times in the face of an intermittent and persisting niggle of pain before you need to hear someone else say it, and believe them. For the last six days I have swung slowly between being rational and being terrified.

What if...?
No.
But what if...?

Needing a rational and calm voice, I called home. My Dad told me to go to Hospital, so I went.

And on my way out of the door, knowing our National Health Service, I grabbed a book. Yesterday in my office someone gave away a lot of books they thought they wouldn't read again. One of the ones I nabbed was Tony Parsons' Man and Wife. I'd not read any of his stuff before. People told me it was heartwarming and funny, and, seeing as Krissa and I are cheerfully striding towards married life, I thought I could do with some light relief.

Sitting alone in the Hospital waiting room, I managed to get a page and a half into the book before having to stop because I thought I was going to cry. The page and a half were describing a wedding, and even if the chance of me having something wrong with my heart was small, at that moment, in that waiting room in that hospital, it was very close. And even though it seems hopelessly overdramatic in retrospect, the thought that I might not get to live out my life with this great love we had found in each other came close to breaking that heart regardless of its condition.

The guy who saw me had the magnificent name 'Edwin Transfiguracíon' on his badge. Blood pressure, okay. Pulse, okay. Temperature, okay.

Off to a staff nurse.
ECG.

She made small talk as she applied the electrode pads to my skin; she joked that my hairy legs and chest made the pads hard to stick down. She asked, and I told her what I did for a living, and her demeanour changed. Her husband had been...severely delayed by the thing my company is responsible for the other day, missing a special dinner. I was wired up on a flat top examining trolley for just a few seconds.

Then the nurse pulled all the wires at once, taking the pads with them, giving me an intermittent wax on patches of my legs and chest. Never tell anyone what you do for a living, I thought.

The ECG went off for inspection, and after mooching round some corridors and a brief physical inspection, I was pronounced fine. It was probably just some internal muscular pain- a strain or pulled muscle.

So there you go.
I was shaking with relief as I called Krissa and my parents from outside the Hospital.