It's Wednesday night. It's a little after 8pm and I just put Lauren to bed. Ordinarily this is the time of day where the wife and I relax, watch some TV, check out stuff on teh internets, etc.

I know that some of you come here for a laugh. Heck, most of you might come here to laugh with me or even at me. Makes no difference to me either way. My goal in all but about five of my blog entries has been to make folks laugh.

But not today.

Let me start from the beginning. Not the very beginning, but the beginning of the most recent chapter.

Sometime during the middle of last week (Wednesday or Thursday), I was running upstairs to get something, and I felt something. In my chest. For a point of reference, if you drew a horizontal line between your nipples and went up about two inches from the center point, right there it felt like someone was driving a railroad spike into my chest.

"What did I do?" you might ask.

I sat the hell down, that's what.

See, we all know I'm not a model of fitness. Hell, I'm barely a model of fatness. I am 37 years old, I smoked a pack a day or so for 21 years (until about four years ago), I drink more than I should and I haven't had any recurring meaningful exercise in about, I don't know, 15 or so years.

So, I understand that I have physical limitations. My aches and pains have aches and pains after doing big phyiscal work like heavy landscaping, moving charcoal by the pallet, or apparently walking up the stairs.

But I have never had a chest pain. Ever. And if you haven't had one either, let me tell you one thing.

It get's your fucking attention.

And I'm not talking chest pain as in Fred Sandford and his "I'm comin' to join you, honey!!" routine or the "Holy shit I think I'm going to die" chest pain.

I'm just talking about a little discomfort that goes away within ten seconds of stopping whatever I was doing to cause it.

In case you didn't know, in the cardio business, they ask you to describe your pain on a scale of one to ten, with one being almost nothing and ten being what you feel the second before you die from pain.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me get back to the order of how things went down.

So I felt this pain and decided that before I could go to the doctor, I needed to be able to quantify the pain and accurately describe its location. Otherwise, my issue might be misdiagnosed.

Well, every time I either went from the kitchen to my office or vice versa, or from the parking lot at work to my office or the other way around, it happened.

The pain would be best described as a very specific kind of pain that would come if someone drove a very narrow spike thru your sternum in the location I described above. It would cease within five to ten seconds of my stopping whatever had angered whatever was causing me this pain.

I got thru the weekend without totally freaking out and then left work early Monday to attend Lauren's Fall Party at school.

When we got home, I mentioned to the wife what had been happening. Needless to say, she was disappointed in me for not telling her.

I explained that I didn't want to worry her unnecessarily until I had a better idea of what and where it was.

She said "You need to go to the doctor. Now."

I replied, "But babe, I was planning to go tomorrow (Tuesday)."

She said "No. I think you need to go to the doctor. Now."

So off I went to the Doctor.

Anyway, after describing the issue to the nurse guy, I spoke with the doctor. He decided to give me an EKG and take a blood sample to check my cholesterol.

I had a normal resting EKG and had my cholesterol checked (which I don't have back yet, but I know is under 160. It always is).

The Doctor said that despite the fact that he didn't see a resting EKG irregularity, the pain and it's pattern warranted a cardiovascular stress test via the treadmill. This joy would take place Wednesday afernoon at 2:30pm. Yipee.

So I left work in time to make it to my appointment in a timely fashion, and filled out the pages and pages of questions they ask you when you report that you're having chest pains.

Then they took me into a room that had a chart on the wall describing the three steps of the nuclear something or other exam. The first step was the treadmill, the second involved the injecting of dye and a much more indepth exam, and the third part, well...that part I was too scared to read.

The nurse hooked me up to an EKG and I got on the treadmill and started to move.

About six or eight minutes in when my heartrate was about 150bpm, the pain came back, but worse. I told the nurse, she called a doctor, and they asked me the "how's your pain on a scale of one to ten?"

I didn't want to overstate or understate the pain. I am, by all accounts, a tremendous pussy. But I wanted to get this right. So I said "three to three and a half."

Like I said, it wasn't "holy shit!" myocardial infarction pain, but it was pain nonetheless.

The doctor set the treadmill to "cooldown" and I did just that. And the pain went away within ten seconds.

The doctor looked at the EKG and said that he noticed some "irregularities" around the time I was describing my "discomfort."

I was then told that, due to those results, I'd need to come back (Thursday at 8:30am as it turns out) for stage two of the nuclear something exam called DIMPS (Dual Isotope Myocardial Perfusion Scan). That's where I spend six hours tomorrow doing the following:

Check in.
Get an IV put in for the six or so injections of radioactive material I'll get throughout the day.
Lay down for 10 to 30 minutes while my heart is observed and filmed at rest.
Hustle on the treadmill until I get to that "discomfort" part from today.
Lay back down for 10 to 30 minutes while my heart is observed kicking ass.

Then, I'll lay there until my heart is totally at rest again, and they'll start over.

After two or three rounds of this, I get to go get some lunch.

When I return, they'll do this whole thing two or three more times.

After that, I'll come home and wait for them to call me and tell me (hopefully) what it is and that (more hopefully) it's either stress or something that's minor enough that it can be treated with medication.

But I know it's not stress. I don't know that it's something serious, but it's not nothing either. And the steps that aren't medicine are things that I don't want to think about as I write this.

I don't want to stress my wife (or myself) any more than I have to right now. She's got enough to worry about. All I want to do is stay home and hold my sweet child and comfort my wife and assure her that everything's going to be okay, even though I'm not sure that it is.

The good news is that I'm 37. I know that doesn't sound good, but it is. I am young enough (in all likelihood) to make the required changes in my life so that I can get past this and never look back and lead a healthy a normal life.

So that's it for now. I'll post more as I know more.