You'll forgive me a bit if I get a bit more personal here than I normally do. I want this to be clearly about human beings (not just me), and not abstractions. Names will be named.

Don't worry, I'll go back to linking to ethnic musicians doing pop songs on Youtube soon enough. But right now? Things have been re-prioritized for me.

Going back just over a week, to Thursday September 17, I had an early morning doctor's appointment (which works out to late night for me - I'd just gotten off of work). It was to be my first time seeing Dr. Lunde, and I expected to get a reasonably standard outcome: "Eat better, exercise more, here's a prescription, now go home."

Dr. Lunde did something entirely unexpected. He listened to everything I said, including my family history. He put it all together. He explained that if I didn't have my family background, he wouldn't have been terribly concerned, but as it was he was prompted to give me an EKG test, and found something interesting on it. Interesting enough to call an ambulance to bring me to the hospital, apparently.

The sirens I heard outside, which I had discounted as Hillcrest local color, were there for me. Even as the half dozen-ish EMTs were around me on the exam table, getting ready to move me to the gurney, I was kind of denying this could all be for me. I felt fine! As they had trouble maneuvering the gurney through the doorway to get alongside the exam table I was perched on, I said, "Um, I can walk, if it helps..."

"You sure?"

"Uh.. Yeah, I feel fine... I'm not really sure what all this is about..."

During the ambulance ride, I tried getting more info out of the EMT. I still didn't understand what all the fuss was about.

I asked, "Is it really this big a deal?"

"Well, it's better to do this now than CPR later."

Couldn't fault the logic.

I was brought to the ER (a couple of blocks away, by my approximation; I could easily have walked it, I thought).

They began running tests. Started with the fairly standard (blood pressure and temperature), doing another EKG, some kind of ultrasound (I really wish I'd gotten a recording of my heartbeat - I mean, it's not like I'd never heard a heartbeat before, but the sound on this thing was amazing and full. I wanted to remix it. The syncopation in in that I was digging may have been part of the problem, though) and some waiting around. With tube and wires attached. It was becoming more and more clear that what I had expected to be a simple 1/2 hour doctor's appointment would be expanding into something else.

Since it had been a couple of hours now since I'd left home, I figured I should probably let my wife know something else was going on.

I'm pretty sure there is something wrong with starting any phone call with, "I'm okay, but...", though I really couldn't think of a better way. I tried to calmly explain to Cyndi that I'm feeling fine, but they have me in the hospital, hooked up to machines, feeling fine, running a variety of tests, and feeling fine.

At this point, it's probably a good idea to explain why it's kinda silly for me to be downplaying this as much as I have been, and talk a bit about that family history I mentioned earlier.

See, my dad's family has a very strong tendency toward heart problems stemming from high cholesterol. Okay, "tendency" is probably a tad weak for my purposes. My uncle Eddie died of a heart attack at 37 years old. My aunt Beth, who used to babysit for me when I was much shorter and was a mother of two, wasn't much older than that when she was taken. Another aunt survived a heart attack at 27. Fifteen years ago, my dad had a six way bypass at 45 years of age (I didn't realized there were six ways to pass). Out of nine sibling, seven have had some combination of cardiac bypass surgery or heart attack.

I am 35. Thirty five years old. 5'7", 155 lbs. Relatively young, not apparently overweight. Not someone you would immediately identify as someone who ought to have open heart surgery, but no Olympic athlete either.

But I knew it was coming; that's why I was going to the doctor - pretty much because of my wife's persistent insistence, as well as Amanda's concerns based on her personal story.

So I find myself attached to a variety of machines, running tests whose results are being interpreted, fortunately for me, by some pretty smart people. Smart enough to see results in one test, and decide that doing the stress test (making me run a treadmill with the tubes and wires attached to show how all my stuff reacts to the situation) wouldn't give clear enough results, and they'd be better off skipping it and going to an angiogram.

Getting the angiogram was not the first time this day that sparked me to think how fucking cool science is. It was, however, the beginning of me giving up on modesty and decorum.

After doing a singalong of Alice's Restaurant (seriously) with Aaron (much to the (I am sure) delight (and completely not annoyance) of a clean-room full of his co-worker medical types), they began the actual test.

Well, after getting trimmed to allow a very narrow tube into my right groin, that would travel up my torso and to my heart - which would then have its nearly unsettlingly clear image put onto a screen in real time. That was pretty neat.

This begins the choruses of, "keep your head down." I just wanted to see what was going on, but apparently they don't think it's a good idea for me to lift my head. More on that later.

After this procedure, I am shown video of my heart, and very specifically where three arteries around it are not quite allowing blood to flow, and one has completely shut down. Fortunately, that one that was completely blocked had managed to grow its own tributary or something and formed a natural bypass.

Short form? I'd need coronary artery bypass graft surgery.

More to come.