by Gary Cain

Created on: March 12, 2009   Last Updated: March 25, 2009

"Go for a cardiac stress test," my family doctor told me. Yikes! I already had plenty of stress in my life, thank you very much. I certainly didn't feel the need to go deliberately looking for additional stress. Then I remembered that my wife's former boss had a heart attack while driving home from his cardiac stress test. Oops, more stress. "Better to get checked out and find nothing, than not to and have an incident," the doc said. An incident, right. What he meant was "HAVE A MASSIVE CORONARY, KEEL OVER, AND DIE A MOST PAINFUL DEATH." But my father had died of heart failure and I was now almost 50, so reluctantly I agreed to get tested.

At 8 a.m. on the appointed day, having obediently skipped the most important meal of the day, my Cheerios breakfast, I dutifully drove to the cardiac clinic in my comfortable, loose fitting clothes and shoes. After the usual paperwork and co-pay extraction, the nice receptionist led me to the back room.

There Nurse One applied a tourniquet to my right arm. Out came a wide bore needle and into the now bulging vein in my arm it went. Oh boy. I took a deep breath. "Stay calm," I told myself. She then attached a short loop of clear tubing and taped it securely in place. She immediately left the room, then quickly returned carrying a heavy-looking container covered with radioactive warning symbols. Radioactive! My mind raced to images of Chernobyl, of nuclear reactor meltdowns, of scientists in heavy suits with beeping Geiger counters, of mushroom clouds, of skeletons, of death. Would I glow in the dark? Set off detectors in airport security?

From the foreboding container, Nurse One pulled out a syringe filled with several milliliters of liquid and injected it through the tubing and into my arm. "This radioactive chemical makes it easier to take the pictures of your heart," Nurse One told me. I expected to feel a sudden flush of spreading warmth as the radiation began to circulate, to see flashes of light as the radioactive atoms energetically decayed and released their insidious nuclear particles. In actuality, no warmth, no flashes of light, nothing.

After a 20 minute wait for the radioactive chemical to fully circulate through my body, Nurse One led me to another room containing a large, white, donut-shaped machine with a long, plain stretcher going through the middle. I was thinking a stretcher, like they have in the MORGUE! "Lie still, arms above your head. This will take the resting state pictures of your heart over the next

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