montreal

so it's been a while since i posted about my heart attack - i mean my "bruised esophagus". well, that's at least what they think it was...

i went to montreal for 4 days about 2 weeks ago. 2 days for pleasure, 2 days for business. the business part was actually really fun - we were conducting an audit at one of our contract labs. i found out that i'm good at finding what people do wrong in their experiments and documentation. i was repeatedly told that i would be good in QA. i don't know if this is a good or bad thing. but it was nice to hear my manager tell our QC director "over my dead body are you going to try to take denise away from me!" it's good to be wanted!

my 2 off days in montreal were awesome, but also very surreal. it was so incredibly refreshing to see and hear a different language around me. i think i was really needing a change of scenery. the cold (it was about -8 degrees C) was really hard to get used to. the first night i almost couldn't breath, it was so friggin cold. i could feel the cold in the core of my body, and it was just painful. so i walked into the first restaurant i found to have dinner and a beer (it was st. patrick's day). this is where i met pascal and sebastien, who entertained me for the rest of the night - we had some shots with the bartenders and shared a "meter of beer". yum. fun. i ended up spending the rest of the weekend with sebastien, who showed me all around the city. this was the best part of my trip, and i really wasn't ready to leave...

last night's adventure

if you ever go to the ER and don't want to wait for hours, just tell the nurse you are experiencing chest pain, and you'll be seen right away.

i'm sure i pissed a lot of people off when i came into the ER at good samaritan hospital last night complaining of chest pain and therefore increased everyone else's wait time.

monday afternoon, around 4 pm, i began to feel an incredible pressure on my sternum, like someone had put 10 bricks on my chest. breathing in was really painful, but i just figured it would go away. i talked to leslie at ~8 pm and her diagnosis was that i was having an anxiety attack. shortly after talking with her, my left arm started to hurt, then began going numb, and that's when i officially started freaking out.

i will try not to drag this out into a really long story, but after having an EKG, a full chest x-ray, drinking a NASTY cocktail of maalox and lidocaine (to determine if it was my stomach or esophagus), and being interrogated about various aspects of my medical history (have i ever done cocaine? um, no!), they found absolutely nothing wrong with me. but the pressure was still there. and i still feel it now, after over 24 hours!

so that was my first, and hopefully my last trip to the emergency room. i see my doctor tomorrow morning to see why this is happening. i hope to be back to normal soon...

men are from mars

it really amazes me how differently men and women are wired. i've been thinking about this over the last few days in the midst of my uncle's death. at the funeral, most of the women were crying, but not the men. my two cousins (men) were utterly straight-faced during their father's funeral today. not to say that they don't have emotions about it, because i know they do. but how do they control it so as to *appear* OK in front of everyone else? i know that if it were i, i'd be a complete disaster. even thinking about it sets of the waterworks. there i go again!

so i am wondering, what does it take for a man to cry?

someone once told me

pain is a dark, beautiful, nostalgic thing.