Ok, blank page. Let's go. I'm hitting enter every time I stop typing and for the time I think for a few seconds.so I can get an idea of what, exactly, it takes to drag me down into stream-of-consciousness on this fucker. Because — it has been A Rough Few Weeks. And I want to get through this in one sitting, which is its own small lie I'm telling myself, because wanting things and doing them are, it turns out, not the same organ.

I started a vacation with my birthday. Good. My in-laws visited. Also good. I dragged them to Masters of the Universe. Bad but also good (and there were so many dick jokes. Good? Not good? Funny? Vaguely funny). But then I spent the following Thursday in the ER Adn we et into the real point of me jamming this screed out while not letting my better judgement get the "better" of me. These things are not related, aside from the fact that time marches onward and we are all aging, quietly, in the background, like a process you forgot was running. I have been worried about my heart health in vague terms for years. The pandemic absolutely gutted my running habit, as did moving to the new house with the orchard and all the responsibilities that come along with it. I have been active but not Active in a way where I feel confident about where my health actually is. I have wanted to fix that for years, in the specific way you want something from across a room instead of from your own hands.

I went to the ER for chest pain and shortness of breath. Which is a guarantee you get fast-tracked to a room. So the fact that I spent 6 hours in the waiting room before being fully admitted is wild to me — me, who wrote the literal software this ED is using to keep patients on the "fast track." There is something very on-brand about the system I built recognizing me as A Specific Kind of Urgent. Something about being the architect of a machine that looks right through you. But they were running a battery of tests as I waited — EKG, BMP, push toradol, second EKG — all while I sat there. Not scared. But worried. Worried in the low, steady hum kind of way, not the siren kind. I figured my EKG was normal enough that nothing was imminent; I've spent enough time around ER nurses to know the difference between a result that's fine-but-needs-more-testing and a "how is he still standing" sort of bad. I was not close to the latter. Which I suspected, but didn't assume. Because I was, after all, in the ER, waiting for the other shoe to drop, and some old animal part of my brain was cataloguing exits.

Toradol is an anti-inflammatory. A good general "reduce any noise in the diagnostics" kind of drug, especially around heart conditions. After about two hours my pain went from an 8 to a 1, which suggested the issue was some sort of inflammation around my heart — pericardial sac, anyone? — that the toradol knocked back exactly as it should. But I was still in a room waiting on a CT scan, because you can't be too careful even when the pain is effectively gone. That could mean nerve issues. It was clear, though, that the ER staff weren't concerned about me anymore — it had become a matter of checking my chest cavity for structural issues that wouldn't show up in bloodwork. Troponin fine. Troponin fine the second time. D-dimer sitting comfortably in "WNL." No chemical markers for heart damage — but none of that looks at the actual heart and lung structures themselves, the meat and architecture of the thing, the part that doesn't show up as a number. So into the CT I went, after some fun getting an IV into dehydrated veins (I'd forgotten to drink anything but coffee all morning — a want so small and so ignored it nearly cost me the vein). The CT went fine. I find CT machines relaxing, it turns out. Spinning, humming noises in a rhythm, a cool comfortable tube, a robotic voice telling me to hold my breath — some sort of relaxation, monkey-brain experiment result I wasn't expecting. The machine that soothes you is also the one keeping score. It doesn't care which. But ultimately. There was something. There's always something. My aorta is "dilated," which is doctor-speak for it has stretched, quietly, on its own schedule, without asking me anything, and they're concerned about it in the generic this-could-be-bad-as-you-age sort of way — even with me sitting just below the "oh fuck" number. 4cm instead of 5.5cm. I just need it checked again in a few months, and then likely every year for a while. Bonus CT scans. What Fallout fan doesn't love a little extra radiation. Maybe I'll turn into a rad scorpion. At least a rad scorpion doesn't have to want anything. It just is.

The result is far from a death sentence. It's very much an "eat better, exercise better" sentence, which

In some ways makes me want to slap myself for not being better about my health the last few years. I'm very much a "here is my reality" sort of stoic, so I don't feel BAD bad. Just annoyed. The goal now becomes weight loss to reduce strain. Walking and running for cardiovascular health. Better asthma management so I can actually do the exercise I want to do. There's that word again, sitting in the sentence like it belongs there.

Do I want that?

Well. I have to want to.

And that's kind of like wanting. Close enough that most days I can't tell the seam. Close enough that I've built a whole personality out of not needing to tell the seam.


My PCP was good-spirited about the results. More reassured than the ER staff, but they're calibrated to emergency, not primary care. Which makes sense. This all makes sense, in some terrible grand scheme I'm only partially privy to — the same way wanting to be healthy and being made to want it eventually collapse into the same shape, if you stretch them long enough. Like an aorta. Quietly. On its own schedule.








And then I went back to work, and here we are.