If I wanted to, I could get a doctor's note for the last few columns I've missed. It would read: "Please excuse the absence of Nils's column. He actually should be found in the Obituaries. Not his column. Him."
This adventure started on New Year's Day. It was a pretty quiet day for me, with just a few social visits. At one stop, a friend's house, I noticed part of her sidewalk needed some tidying up, so I grabbed a shovel that was handy and cleared away some snow.
And I felt a little ... twinge. In the middle of my chest.
"Hmm," I said to myself. "Odd." And gave it not one more thought ...
... at least until later, when I was visiting some other friends and had to climb over a bit of a snowbank to get around a car that was carelessly parked.
Another twinge. Not "pain". Just a little tightening. Like something in my chest was saying, "Hello. I'm in here. Pay some attention."
But I didn't. Not just then.
I got home around suppertime and came in to find a note from my wife. She'd gone out to dinner with our older daughter. The house was cool - it had been a while since anyone had thrown wood on the fire. So I went out into the wood shed, got an armload of logs, carried them into the house ...
Twinge.
Well, that was three strikes. Now I was a tiny bit concerned.
See, about three years ago, my brother keeled over one day and died on the spot from a massive heart attack. In the time since, I have often wondered if he'd had warnings. Twinges. Pain. Tightenings. Anything that would have hinted to him that he should go visit his local Emergency Room.
I know my brother well enough to know he probably did. But he was a typical "guy". He would have shrugged it off. He was too busy to go to an ER. It was just a twinge. It was probably nothing. The people in ER have their hands full with folks who are really sick; they don't need me wandering in and whining about a little chest pain. All the things guys say.
Well, all the things dead guys say. Or would. Except they're not saying much of anything, because of the whole "being dead" thing, and all.
I want to be clear, I'm not blaming my brother, or any of the other formerly living guys who decided they shouldn't pester the poor busy folks at the ER just because they had a little chest pain and shortness of breath. We are brought up to think that way.
I'm not entirely sure I understand it.: "I don't want to bother the folks at the ER with something like this." Isn't that a little like: "Yes, I have a flat tire, but I don't want to bother the folks at the tire store about it."?
"Sure, my kids need an education, but I hardly see why we need to trouble all those hard-working folks down at the school."
Here's the thing I have learned about people who work in Emergency Rooms: very few of them do it as a hobby. These are not dabblers. They are in this full time, and are paid to be there. So thinking you are "bothering them" when you come in with chest pains is like apologizing to the pilot for taking up a seat on his airplane.
I saw what happened when my brother shuffled so suddenly off this mortal coil. I saw the devastation he left behind - the grieving sons, the heartbroken wife, unfinished business, grandchildren he would never see. Life goes on, of course. But it is in so many ways diminished when it goes on without a treasured friend, a father, grandfather, brother, husband.
Sometimes, all that can't be helped. People die every day. But often something can be done about it. And if something could, I figured I had a responsibility to pretty much everybody to explore that possibility.
So I drove myself into the Emergency Room.
(I caught a lot of flak for that later, by the way. But I figured I had been driving around all day. Another few kilometers wasn't going to tip the balance one way or another. And I was still pretty sure this was just an annoyance. To me, I was just going in to have them peek under the hood.)
When I got to the ER, there were probably 20 or more people hanging around, waiting. It was New Year's Day. People are always hanging around the ER, but holidays are especially busy.
I went to the triage nurse and she smiled up at me. "What seems to be the problem?" she asked.
I said, "Well, I'm kind of having these chest pains ..."
Her smile froze, and things started happening very quickly.
To be continued ...
