Following a rich wedding feast the previous night, I had a bit of pain on the left side of my chest so I took myself to a cardiologist. Pretending not to be worried, I said with elaborately feigned nonchalance, “I suppose we might as well do a stress test, right? And while we are at it, why not throw in a Thallium scan too? I know it’s nothing, but you can’t be too careful with left-side chest pains, ha ha .”
If you want to be taken seriously, never go to a doctor who is a friend. The son-of-a-gun made fun of me.
“No,” he said, “We should not stop at Thallium. We’ll do an angiogram as well and I’ll get the bypass boys on stand-by. You’re getting on in age and you belch smoke like a steam-engine, so a CT scan of the chest is a must. Cancer of the lung,” he intoned, allowing his voice to drop to a whisper. “And since your pain is just behind the nipple, a biopsy won’t hurt. Carcinoma of the male breast isn’t all that rare, you know. These days you talk rubbish mostly; maybe the cancer has spread to your brain. We can catch it with an MRI.”
“Very funny,” I said, “you should audition for a stand-up comic on TV. Here I am, with possible angina, and you’re sounding like one.”
While he was doing the ECG he continued to be funny at my expense. Failed late-life romances often lead to heartache, he said, punning atrociously. Was I sure there wasn’t anything of the kind? He looked at the ECG, grimaced, then loosened my trouser belt. He placed his left palm on my tummy and moved it round, tapping its middle-finger with the middle finger of his right hand. My abdomen boomed like a bass drum being hit. He leaned away and pronounced himself satisfied. I asked, “Anything in the ECG? Tell me, I can take it.”
“Just a bag of wind,” he responded tersely. “Don’t eat too much and too fast...”
And that’s the message for all you trenchermen out there; everytime you get a pain in the left chest after you’ve eaten more than you should and faster than you should, see a doctor of course. It can certainly be angina; if you happen to have partly blocked coronaries you might get a temporary reduction in blood flow to the heart and consequent angina. But the stomach lies just beneath the heart and an overfilled stomach can press upwards and cause discomfort.
So, before you panic over a heart attack, exclude the possibility that it’s just wind.
drnnair@gmail.com
