Very early Wednesday morning I woke up with some discomfort in the left side of my chest. Being diabetic, I'm at more risk for heart disease, so I called my doctor's office and got the on-call doctor paged. After a few questions, he urged me to go to the emergency room.

My wife took me to the hospital, which took me in right away. They had me wired up, poked, prodded, vitals taken, IV in, and in a hospital gown within 5 minutes. They gave me nitro-glycerin and a narcotic, did 3 EKGs, a complete blood workup, and a chest x-ray. After those tests, they determined that I hadn't had a heart attack and that the EKGs looked normal. Not wanting to risk anything, they tested my blood 3 more time at 2 hr intervals for the presence of the enzyme that would indicate heart trouble.

Since those all came up negative, they wanted to do a stress test on my heart to look at how well blood is flowing and the heart is pumping. They do this by injecting a radioactive isotope (thallium) into my blood. This isotope collects in the heart muscle and shows up well on x-ray. They put me in this circular contraption that goes around the body and takes multiple x-rays. Then they put me on a treadmill and walked me until my heartrate was up, then a step further. They then inject more thallium and do more x-rays.

End result? My ticker is in a-ok shape, in fact "fantatic shape for a 40 year old diabetic male who's overweight," said the doc. They went over all the test results. Said in addtion to heart, they'd ruled out kidney, gall bladder, pancreas, liver, spleen and digestive troubles due to the blood tests and x-rays. So what, then, is the problem? Doc thinks stress and advised me to see my regular Dr. next week.