My father is a physician, so as a child, I rarely went to the doctor. I simply told Dad. If it was something that he considered minor, he would carefully consider what I had said, examine any wound, and say very seriously, “I think we’ll have to amputate.” I grew to fear amputation as much as killer bees, king cobras, and being put to bed on Saturday night before Fantasy Island. If you hear that a number of times as a child, you are pretty much loath to go to the doctor as an adult, excepting of course the really big things.

Using the closest thing he has to sad puppy dog eyes, Chris made me promise last year to get annual wellness check-ups. I chose a physician that I could grow old with, meaning that she is 15 years younger than I am, and except for the fact that I have to pay a co-pay and sit in an office for several hours all to hear that absolutely nothing is wrong with me, I like her just fine. She is both charming and disarming, which is why I forgot to lie when she asked me if I ever had chest pains.

“Oh sure,” I replied. Then, recognizing my mistake: “Don’t worry, it’s nothing but stress-induced cardio myopathy.” And indeed, when I undergo emotional stress, I have whopper chest pains, complete with tightness, nausea, and a crushing feeling. I have never gone to the emergency room; it would be a lie to say that I had never thought about it.  But to put her mind at ease, I went on to explain my diagnosis, my facility with the internet (my having received a degree — summa cum laude, naturally — from the Medical College of Google), and my certainty that there was absolutely nothing wrong with my heart.

Case closed, right?

Unbelievably, she was unimpressed, and I could tell by the look on her face that she was now seriously considering a psychiatric examination. I called my father for back-up, and instead of pausing a beat and threatening amputation, he told me too that I should go through with the testing.

About the time I hung up with him, and far faster than you can even imagine, a scheduler called to make me an appointment for an EKG and a stress test for a few days hence.

Which is why I found myself sitting in the registrar’s office of the hospital’s heart center on March 1.

One of the great things about self-employment is the extremely expensive and utterly underwhelming health insurance available to a small business. Perhaps hooking me up to cardiac monitors that morning in the registration office would have given the most accurate gauge of how my heart responds to stress, for when the registration clerk told me that my co-pay was $2,350 (American), I nearly fell out. There was a furtive call to Chris, complete with my hissing, do you really want to pay $2,350 (American) to find out that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with me? and his kind, measured response, I want you around for a very long time. There was the moment when the registration clerk basically pried my credit card out of my hands to run the co-pay. And there was some speculation about exactly what was wrong with me, for I had five separate nuclear medicine evaluations scheduled.

I eventually got out of that office, much poorer than I had walked in, and then I saw one of the few things that day that made me genuinely happy: The receptionist in the EKG area looked exactly like Will Ferrell.

But Audrey, who performed the EKG, looked nothing like Will Ferrell, and she made me recline in this chair:

(I love what they’ve done with the place, by the way.)

She was thorough, which is a nice way of saying that there were times that I thought the probe would breach my rib cage and end up in my chest cavity, and she was professional, which is a nice way of saying that she didn’t laugh at any of my jokes, including when she told me I was scheduled for a bubble test and I asked if that involved champagne. But she did tell me that I had a beautiful heartbeat, which appealed to my competitive nature, and she did answer my approximately one billion questions about the heart.

Audrey was probably happy to be rid of me, what with my acting like an 8 year-old in a health class, and was definitely happy to be rid of me when I started crying. Yes, crying. Here is an odd discovery from an EKG: There are few sights more fascinating than watching and listening to one’s heart happily beat away on a screen. It is downright mesmerizing, with the hammer of the valve dropping in lockstep regularity. And the noise! Although I have never been in a submarine — unless you count the now-gone “10,000 Leagues Under the Sea” ride at Disney World — I blurted out, “It sounds just like a submarine!” (What?) Did you know that the different chambers of the heart make different noises?

Seriously, I was delighted. Not $2,350 worth of delight, but delighted nonetheless.

At some point, I required an IV, and since this is Savannah, in walked a nurse that I had met once at a party. I must have made a poor impression, for the IV she inserted was equine-sized. She told me, too, that if I ended up seeing her again, she would be the one placing the catheter.

Note to self: Work on party skills.

But Audrey finished, and I went down to nuclear medicine, and there was a tech there who looked exactly like Andre Agassi (bald, Charlie Brown U.S. Open, not mullet, acid-washed U.S. Open), and Andre Agassi shot me up with something radioactive.

And I waited.

And I waited.

And I waited.

If you want to know what I look like while I’m waiting, I got so bored that I took a picture of myself waiting:

Andre Agassi eventually came to get me and put me in a machine where I had to be completely still for 15 minutes. But the image quality was bad — we can’t tell what the lower wall of your heart looks like — so I had to drink more water, walk around, and wait some more so that I could do the same test, 15 minutes absolutely still again. The lower wall of my heart remained a mystery.

And then I took the stress test, which is a fancy way of saying that I walked on a treadmill set at a very high incline. Since the treadmill operator kept saying “we” — as in, how are we feeling today? — I insisted on playing music during the treadmill test, and for the four people having to watch me walk successfully uphill for those minutes, that was my gift to you. Well, that and singing “Dripping with Finesse” until I ran out of breath. No one stopped the treadmill, which led me believe that I was in no cardiac danger, and since the music was good and I was the only person ever who had enjoyed walking on the treadmill, they let me stay on there until my heart hit over the range.

To recap: $2,350 co-pay. Six hours of my life spent in a hospital. An enormous IV. All to discover that I was fine.

But was I?

The stress test began at the threshold of three weeks of very hard, very stressful work. There was anxiety, sleeplessness, 14 hour days. There was combativeness and arguing. There were, of course, chest pains. Many, many chest pains.

There was also this unmistakable conclusion: Perhaps I need to do what I can to avoid those chest pains, which don’t just arise during three weeks of very stressful work. No, they pretty much hit all the time.

If I’m being honest, that is.

I have terrible anxiety. I worry like nobody’s business. I live constantly at DEFCON 1. I find my personal doomsday clock constantly poised at 11:59:58. I want people to like me. I seek approval. I try very hard. I try very hard all the time.

It reminds of something a dear friend once told me: You smart girls are all alike. You think that everything is your fault.

I do. Oh, I do.

I know what this means, even though I am not certain exactly how to resolve it or what to do.  I will keep doing some of the things I have been doing for a few months. I continue not to buy things — or at least not to buy meaningless things — since money and too much stuff cause anxiety. I work out, but now not too hard. I do not drink caffeine. I practice yoga, and I set my intention to be kind to myself.

Maybe because of these things, but at least since this realization, I have been able to sleep well, something that has eluded me for at least the last decade. If I wake up all worried, I tell myself that I need my sleep to find a solution in the morning. That often works.

Now I am trying something new. When I realized how envious I was when a friend literally lost her phone, I figured I could lose my phone, too, figuratively speaking. I started by removing my Facebook app, since I had been checking social media too much. Guess what? Whether you check their status once an hour or once a week, your true friends are still your true friends. I have disabled the notification badge from my work email, because not every query needs to be answered at 5:41 a.m. with the “Sent from my iPhone” legend. I am considering re-subscribing to the morning paper — and not the electronic version that one can read on her phone.

On my list is to make amends with a few people (having been inspired to do that by making amends with myself), under-schedule my weekends, and really work on those actual, face-to-face friendships. While I may think everything is my fault, the only thing that is actually my fault is the only thing in this world in my complete control: Me. And I am trying. Very hard.

Google medical degree and all, the chest pains are terrifying. Now that they are expensive, they have my attention. You can’t amputate your heart, girl. You have to be honest and seek care. Sometimes you even have to wait. And wait. And wait. And wait. But eventually, you get the results. Sometimes the results are what you hoped for all along.

ALC