When I was growing up, it was a family rule that my mother was to be shielded from anything medically messy. Hospitals, bloodied knees, and gory stories all had the same effect on her: extreme squeamishness, which would lead to dizziness and, occasionally, a dead faint. I have a vivid memory of her sitting at the kitchen table and pitching face first into a cup of coffee as my aunt recounted a gruesome car accident she'd witnessed.
I have inherited my mother's squeamish gene in its most powerful form. In addition to squeamishness and dizziness, I get sympathetic symptoms. If you tell me about your gall bladder operation, it will not only make me woozy, it will make my abdomen hurt. While some might describe this behavior as hypochondriac, I prefer to think of it as extreme empathy. I feel your pain. Literally.
This is why, I believe, on the night David was admitted to the cardiac care unit, I developed a chest pain. It wasn't a big crushing pain and I was very sure it wasn't the signal of a cardiac event. It was more like someone was pinching my chest from the inside. A mean, insistent thread of pain that refused to go away.
Gary took me to the fifth floor cardiac care unit, where they'd transferred David after the procedure. CCU was set up like a neighborhood, with a long corridor in the middle and rooms on either side as well as off of the cul-de-sac on the end. The whole place twittered with the rhythmic beeps of heart monitors. David was at the end of the corridor in a small windowed room. He was lying in the center of a dense nest of wires and tubes too numerous to count. The heart pump fed signals to a beeping monitor at the foot of his bed. His chest was covered with electrodes that fed information into another beeping monitor near his head. Various drips fed his body liquids and medicine. The little pinches in my chest grew more insistent.
David was sleepy, but aware. Adam had arrived and the two of us stood next to David's bed. He told us what he remembered about the procedure, which, surprisingly, was a lot. We told Adam about the EMS angels who'd saved David's life. In the coming weeks we would tell that story again and again and never get tired of the happy ending. Gary stopped by to check up on David and say goodnight. I hesitated to mention my chest pain. There would be plenty of time later on for Gary to validate what I already knew. It was stress-related. It would go away eventually. Sleep and, perhaps, some tranquilizers would help. Tonight I would go home and get some sleep. Tomorrow I would ask Gary for tranquilizers.
2:28:27 PM 
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