Take one dodgy family medical history, add in a couple of slightly perplexing test results, combine with a doctor who never met a medical procedure he didn’t like, and you get this:“I want you to have an angiogram.”
When? you ask.
“Today,” he says.
Dim recollections enter your mind. Angiogram. Isn’t that the exam in which they scootch a wire up a bloodway into your heart and have a gander? From an entry point in an area where a man least wants a pack of strangers meddling? Won’t that be ... unpleasant?
“They’ll make you comfortable,” the doctor says.
Your ideal state for a procedure of this level of invasiveness could best be described as “unconscious.” As you were the last time medical personnel peered around in your inner regions. This theme dominates your thinking as you make your way to the friendly local hospital, where you move along with surprising speed to a room filled with people in beds along the wall, separated by retractable curtains. A nurse named Pam takes you into her care.
“You’ll be comfortable,” she says, as she pokes a needle into a vein in your left arm. A needle that feels distinctly larger than those used to extract blood. A quite attractive young physician assistant stops by to tell you what is soon to happen, which includes the possibility that something resembling the spring in a ballpoint pen will be permanently inserted into your heart tubing. Oh, and there is the rare but occasional bleeding. And heart attack.
You are then wheeled into another room where you edge onto a table beneath a big light. Two more nurses there promise to “make you comfortable” with a cocktail they will inject as soon as the doctor arrives. You ask that it include a Jack and water.
The good news they provide is that it appears the entry point for the scootching can be your wrist, instead of that other place. As a precaution, though, both places are washed with a soap that feels oddly cold. The doctor arrives, the cocktail flows, and he inquires as to its impact. You ask if it can be augmented with a single malt scotch, preferably from the Islay region.
At some point during all this, perhaps while your mind is wandering off to Scotland, the scootching occurs. A dye is injected, with the resultant sensation that you are taking a warm shower, but only on the inside. The dye allows an image to be seen on a screen, an image the doctor shows you. It looks to you like a map of the Amazon and its tributaries, but to the doctor it signifies something else: everything in your ticker, he says, is A-O.K. Those previously perplexing test results must have involved a false positive, he says. No big deal.
At which point, for the first time all day, you feel very comfortable.
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