Today I learned the magic words for getting instant health care

Those words are "chest pains."*

How do I know this? Well, within an hour after my last final of the semester (all done – woo hoo! although I totally forgot to mention a significant issue in one of the questions! drat!), my heart started racing like a freight train, or whatever else goes REALLY REALLY FAST and pounds in your chest like a mofo. It wasn't super painful, exactly, but it was really really uncomfortable (probably doesn't help that I don't work my heart very hard regularly these days!). It wasn't as bad when I was sitting quietly, but it got worse when I walked around, plus it got me way out of breath.

For totally unrelated, fortuitous reasons, NLLDH was on campus, so he met me at the law school and he drove me in the direction of home (my poor little car is sitting alone in the law school parking lot right now). As we got near the city, I didn't feel better, so we ended up taking me to the doctor.

Turns out, I was having an episode of supraventricular tachycardia – my heart was beating at over twice its normal rate. It's completely un-life-threatening, just very uncomfortable and a supreme PITA. And because the manual options for fixing it didn't work, I got to be injected with adenosine, which stops your heart for two seconds so it can restart in a normal rhythm. Let me tell you, THAT was a fun feeling (yes, you are awake throughout this. It's better than getting shocked with the paddles, though).

Anyway, the instant health care bit – well, NLLDH and I have been lucky not to encounter many medical emergencies, and we don't really have the routine down. When we got back to the city we were really close to where I get my primary care, so we just went there, to see whether I could make an appointment with my doctor or what we needed to do. The check in line was acres long, so we walked into the "information center" and said we didn't have an appointment and asked if we should go to the ER.

Within 30 seconds of uttering the words "chest pains," I was in a wheelchair and being whisked to a treatment cubicle, where four nurses converged upon me, stuck an oxygen cannula up my nose and a blood pressure cuff on my arm, and covered me with electrodes. They then each proceeded to examine each of my limbs, looking for a likely vein in which to begin the IV – which none of them could find. (It took two more nurses to find a vein. I suck like that. My mom, she has veins like rubber hoses, but my dad never had any decent veins, either.)

Anyway, they were super nice and tried various non-medicinal ways to break the weird heart rhythm, but they couldn't administer the adenosine because there were no physicians available, and since I was perfectly alert and felt pretty decent other than the sledgehammer going in my chest, they decided they'd wait.

Till the ambulance arrived.

Yes, I got to take my first ambulance ride! Because the clinic couldn't administer this level of care, I had to go to the hospital (the same one where I got my gall bladder out).

The hospital that is ACROSS THE STREET from the clinc.

Yes, they would not let me walk across the street – they had to transport me in an ambulance.

And the thing is, now that I think about it, that makes perfect sense: if someone shows up in your clinic complaining of chest pains, and you send them across the street to the ER, and they collapse halfway there with a major cardiac arrest or the like, you. are. SCREWED. But this just totally didn't occur to me ahead of time! So I felt like a total idiot, making the nice ambulance guys trek me all of about a hundred feet. But hey, now I know what it's like in the back of an ambulance.

The other funny thing – one of the ambulance guys was a trainee, and the head ambulance guy asked if the trainee could observe the procedure because he'd never seen an adenosine push. So he stood there and watched, which was fine – but after, he was intensely curious: "But what did it FEEL like??"

(For the record, you can totally feel the drug move through your arm to your chest, and it feels kind of like someone has got under your skin and is squeezing your muscles, hard, along the drug's path, until it stops with *thunk* at your heart.)

For the record, this is, like I said, completely non-life-threatening, and it has nothing to do with overall health – it's not a sign of heart problems or anything like that. There's no clear cause, either, but in this case, it's probably safe to say it was stress-related (they were all fairly amused to hear that I'd just finished my first semester exams when this happened, although they also assumed that must mean I've spent the last week or so pulling all-nighters and pounding Red Bull, which, of course, I haven't.) I wonder if I could get away with telling my professor that her exam sent me to the hospital?

*Apologies to those of you who've already seen this on both Facebook AND Twitter.