It should have ended in 1989 on November the 15th, and it came damned close. I had just flunked my stress test, and I was waiting for the cardiologist that I was supposed to see while he finished up a heart catherization procedure on another patient. I was chatting with the receptionist in radiology when the chest pains started coming on hard. I was suddenly weak and out of breath and I had to sit down. The radiology nurse happened by about that time and noted that I was ashen grey and looked like I was in distress. She grabbed a wheelchair and in two minutes I was in the ER, hooked up to a monitor and with three nurses busy putting in a coupla IV lines. The ER doc came in and told me that I was having a coronary and I said "no shit, doc!" The cardiologist had finished his procedure and they were getting the patient off of the table and it was my turn. A nurse told me that she was going to give me some morphine and I stopped her… if this was the last I was to see of this world, I wanted it to be clear, to hell with the pain. I was on the table within fifteen minutes of the first pains, a stroke of luck indeed. I had first signed the paper that said that I wouldn't sue anyone if I died from subsequent procedures. The femoral puncture was made rather easily about ten seconds after the cardiologist gave me the local, but that little pain was nothing compared to what was going on in my chest. The cardiologist then threaded a long catheter through my femoral artery up into my left ventricle. The pain in my chest was like heartburn, but absolutely unremitting. Not really the crushing chest pain that I had expected, but more epigastric, right under my rib cage. I had known in the ER that if I didn't get fixed really soon, I was going to die, but still the pain continued and I didn't die… The first images with contrast appeared on the screen: I had no left main coronary artery, it was 99% blocked. Good news, though… there was adequate collateral circulation to just barely keep my heart beating. Collateralization is pretty unusual in coronary disease, and the fact that it was there was indicative of long-standing disease. I had seen images like this before, as a tech, observing heart caths. The patients went to surgery and usually died either immediately or several days after the surgery. But those were people in the general population, and it had taken a while to get them on the table, those that made it that far. Timing… timing is everything. As soon as the doc saw the blockage he started the clot-buster streptokinase going through the catheter and called for a balloon catheter to be prepared. He threaded the guide wire into the coronary and forced it through the clot and past it, then he passed the balloon catheter over the wire and positioned it with the markers on either side of the narrowed area. When he inflated the balloon the pain briefly increased, and I thought, "this was it, this is when I die…" fifteen seconds, I was counting each second, holding my breath. On the screen, my heart continued to beat, and the inflated balloon looked like a sausage bobbing up and down with each beat. The doc deflated the balloon… and I was suddenly pain-free. It took a few seconds to realize that I didn't hurt any more. The pain was gone, and I was still alive! But I was horribly exhausted… incredibly tired, tireder than I had ever been before in my life. Everything, everything since then has been gravy, pure gravy. Someday, I'll write about my second coronary, and I'll get JD to write his side of it. He's never really told me much about how it looked from his side, and I would be interested in hearing that.