I have not been blogging a lot lately. It is an awful twist of fate and irony that my motivation for writing is directly proportional to how busy or stressed I am. If I am busy or stressed, I am full of ideas, I want to write. I was laid off from my Software Engineer position (that I held for 14.5 years) last July. You think I'd be spending a lot of time blogging, because I don't have a lot else to do, but this just isn't the case. I have about twenty post started but each time I look at them with intention of working on them, I just can't do it. No motivation. When I look at my blog and I see years when I posted about 40 different entries, these are also the periods in my life when I am the most busy or stressed. Such is life.
Wednesday 1/11/23 started like any other. I got up with the boy, got his snack box ready and walked with him out to the bus. I returned to the warmth of the house, I made coffees, read email, looked at jobs on LinkedIn and listened to my morning podcasts. I ate an egg sandwich for breakfast, fed the dogs and then did some yoga on the Wii. Nothing out of the ordinary. At around noon, I noticed I had a dull pain along the length of my left arm that went across the top of my chest down to the top of my right shoulder. It was an odd pain. I have a lot of muscle pain, always have, but this felt different, like nothing I had ever felt before. I walked into the living room and laid down. I tried to sleep it off which I had zero success of doing. The pain wasn't that strong and never was, just very uncomfortable. I also had a lot of coffee at this point so I couldn't relax much either.
I started to worry that this might be a heart attack. I remembered a conversation I had with my doctor when he told me that in addition to the pain, heart attacks usually come with shortness of breath. Since I didn't have that, I waited ... but not very long. I called my doctor to discuss. He said "oh oh." He suggested I get to the emergency room, not to drive, but have someone bring me. If I didn't have someone to bring me, call 911. I then called my wife to see how close she was to the house. She was about 35 minutes away in Burlington. I called 911. I texted her and she left to meet me at the hospital.
Fairfax rescue was conferenced into my call almost immediately. This is my first experience with 911. I am impressed. I waited about 15 minutes for the ambulance to show up. I live on a dirt road, a town away. This was quite fast. I tried to occupy my time to manage the freak out. Nothing much worked. I put the dogs outside, I grabbed my phone and Kindle, put them in my jacket and sat at the puzzle table looking down the driveway. Doing the jigsaw puzzle was a Herculean task at this point. I didn't get a single piece.
When the ambulance arrived, they tried to back down the driveway. It has been unseasonably warm lately so when they went into the mud (aka my lawn), I feared they would get stuck and I'd have to wait for another ambulance or a tow truck. But she, the driver, pulled herself out just fine. Four EMTs got me quickly in the ambulance, attached to IVs and EKG machine. I looked like a borg and still do. Here is a picture of what I look like:
