Last Saturday was one of the more frightening days of my life.  I got up in the morning and took Mr. Grey to his TBall game.  At the game I noticed some pain in my chest.  It didn’t go away.  When we got home, the pain was still there.

I googled heart attack symptoms.

Back in 2006, I had an episode like this and it had turned out to be stress related.  At the time, work was driving me nuts and I’d just come back from a trip to London where I’d worked about 10 days straight and pulled about 150 hours building out a PoP in a data center and establishing.  The chest pains came on a Friday afternoon as I was preparing to cut over a couple of WAN connections in Singapore.  I was in the US and was planning to the work remotely.  I ended up in the ER but there was nothing that was found with my heart.

Stress kills.

Around 11:30 last Saturday, my left hand went numb.

When I walked into the ER, I told them that I thought I might be having a heart attack.  They took me back immediately and before I knew it they were drawing blood and hooking me up to an EKG.  Everything appeared to be fine, but they wanted to keep me for observation.  I spent the rest of Saturday afternoon in the ER.  A second blood draw and another EKG confirmed that I was not having a heart attack.

Inflamed cartilage was the diagnosis.

I haven’t been doing the right things.  A friend texted me the other day to say that he’d not seen any activity from me on Strava.  That’s right, I haven’t been riding.  I haven’t been eating right either.  It’s been a mad rush of go-go-go and eating whatever I can whenever I can.

Time for a change. (Stress Kills)

So, I’m easing back into riding, at least I’m telling myself I’m going to.  And I’m working out a menu that isn’t 100% junk.