Here’s my status right now, for those who have been wondering.

First of all, I’m not dead yet. Let’s get that out of the way.

Yesterday morning was the big event here in hospital-land: I was to get an angiogram, this procedure where they thread wires up your femoral artery to you heart and start poking around with dyes and things to figure out what’s going on. You’re conscious, mostly, through the procedure, so thought I’d live-blog it, if I could, but it turns out they don’t want you monkeying around with anything while the doctors are examining you from the inside out, and there were going to be occasional sprays of x-rays, and I was going to be on some mind-altering drugs. So I resolved to use my keen scientific mind to observe and report back later on what it was like.

They wheeled me in and a nice nurse named Phil leaned over me and told me he was going to put some drugs in my IV that would make me drowsy, which was silly — it was 8am, I was wide awake — but he gave them to me anyway. Then someone else appeared on my right side and shaved my pubic hair. Not everything — he left me a short wide rectangular patch for a landing strip that looked like Hitler’s mustache…and then I noticed that Hitler had a very large nose and two big pink hairy eyeballs, and that kept me amused for about 10 minutes. I think that was my last lucid thought. (Well, it seemed lucid at the time.)

The Jawas came in. They might have been doctors, but they were all covered in robes and hoods and speaking animatedly in some language that wasn’t Englisth — it was very buzzy and abrupt. They didn’t talk to me anyway, but sometimes told Phil things that he would translate for me. They descended on my right thigh and proceeded to build an airlock so they could crawl inside and party on my left ventricle. I tried to tell them that the Left Ventricle was not some trendy nightclub — it’s just a storage unit where I keep my Jesus-shaped hole — but I think what came out of my mouth was a kind of mumbly moan in Ewok, and everone knows Jawas don’t understand Ewok.

And giant cameras just glided by majestically on motorized trackways above my head.

It hurt quite a bit, in a very remote, distracted, distant way, especially then the anaconda in my leg writhed awkwardly, but I was mostly unperturbed. I actually fell asleep a few times.

Then Phil’s giant head floated into view — I think it was mounted on one of the camera tracks—and he announced, “Good news! No cabbage for you!”, which was very cheering, since I don’t particularly care for cabbage. And then the Jawas stomped on my heart for another hour or so. While I napped.

Later, after the cotton swabbing drained out of my cranium, I realized it was very good news. The threat hanging over me was an angiogram followed by chest-cracking and open heart surgery and prolonged pain, but the clever doctors had looked me over and decided they could patch me up with set of stents instead of that elaborate bypass surgery. Yay, doctors! It’s the difference between 8 weeks of ouchy hurty messy convalescence and less than two weeks of taking it easy.

The last fun bit was when they had to strip the hoses from my thigh, which involved a quick yank and then a doctor with very large strong hands holding my naked thigh in a death grip for half an hour. I tell you, that’s a very awkward situation for small talk.

So, I might be getting out today. They’re doing more tests, checking out my kidneys (which had a lot of extra work to do clearing out the contrast dye). Right now, my life consists of lying abed while a pretty nurse comes by every hour and says, “I need to see your groin!”, whips off my skimpy robe, and coos about how good it looks. I think she’s probably talking about my bloody wound, not anything else (and I hope it’s not because she’s a fan of Adolf Hitler caricatures!)

But soon enough I’ll be off to resting at home, beginning the cardio therapy the doctor will no doubt be putting me on, and back to classes and writing. Expect blogging to be on the light side, though, while I catch up on rest and other pressing projects that were interrupted by this surprise event.

I’m in big trouble. My wife is sending me pictures of cute puppy dogs to make me feel better.

Where’s the slime? The chitin? The tentacles? How is this supposed to cheer me up?

Anyway, I’ve been trapped in the hospital overnight, and this morning they promise to finally give me the really good drugs and turn me into a vegetable for a few hours while they stick knives in my heart, which will be a welcome relief from the excruciating boredom. Then I get to wake up to the pain, which won’t be fun at all. At any rate, this is the scary morning, and the rest is recuperation — I’ll let you all know once I’m semi-functional again. Maybe this afternoon. Maybe tomorrow.

Now that it is over, I can say what happened — sometimes people freak out over this kind of thing, and there were no real worries here.

On Friday, as I do every day, I went out for a walk for about an hour — I strolled down to the Stevens County Fair, on an unpleasantly muggy early afternoon, and then walked back home…and I was almost there when I felt a peculiar tightness in my chest. That’s odd, I thought, I wasn’t exerting myself that much. And then I felt a slow ache building in my left arm.

If you have any familiarity with physiology and medicine at all, you know that is a very bad sign. I was about equidistant from home, where I briefly thought I would just go, lie down, and feel the odd weak ache go away, and the Stevens County Medical Center, where I would go if I were sane and taking the problem seriously. Sanity won handily, since I had a father who had his first heart attack in his early forties, and after a series of more heart attacks, would die in his mid-fifties. So I turned right and walked two blocks to the medical center (if I’d been entirely sane, I probably should have whipped out my cell phone and called them, but it was such a mild pain, and I was so close…).

Anyway, it turns out that if a 50ish man walks into a hospital and mentions chest pains radiating into the left arm, there is a kind of automatic freak-out response that I’m sure saves lives. I was flat on my back on a bed with an IV needle in a vein and a nitroglycerin pill under my tongue in about 30 seconds, and then I was hooked up to an EKG and surrounded by doctors and nurses. The ache was also gone right after that, but then I was completely in their control, and was wheeled right up into a hospital room for 24 hours of observation, which because it was a weekend, turned into several days of observation and tests and getting blood drawn every four hours and being awakend at 2am for more tests, all while being wired up to telemetry widgets.

It made for an epically boring weekend.

The good news, though, is that there was no sign of a heart attack, and even when they subjected me to a stress test (no fun at all for a sedentary professor) the pains did not return. The bad news is that all my bad habits were exposed and measured, and it turns out I have moderately high blood pressure, which is already responding to drugs, and a few little cardiac abnormalities that they’re going to check out more thoroughly later this week with an angiogram. So I’m OK! Don’t start the deathwatch yet!

It could have been worse. Mainly what I got was slapped upside the head with a warning, this time.

The main consequences are that I’m going to be taking pills everyday, and that I have to change my diet to more cardboard and blandness, which the TrophyWife™ has grimly seized upon as an excuse to take over all the cooking at home, and stick me with the dishwashing job. I think it also means that when I’m off giving talks and joining in the post-event celebration at the local bar, I’ll be eschewing the greasy bar food for a salad. Damn.

Oh, well, this is the price we pay for the accidents of family history. I got a brain and an appreciation of learning from both my parents, but my mother’s iron constitution passed me by, and instead I got my father’s heart. I’m not complaining, though, since it was the heart of a romantic poet; we all know how fragile those things are, but I wouldn’t trade it in for anything.

Oh, and for everyone reading this: if you feel some persistent twinge that you suspect might be a sign of some problem, but you think maybe if you just lie down for a bit and the symptom will go away, don’t. Get it checked out, even if it does mean you get to spend a weekend in a bed surrounded by beige walls.

I’ll be whipping out another talk at the Critical Thinking Club in St Paul this morning, and another in Stillwater on Monday. Just in case some of you locals want to stop by.

I got cornered by Carin Bondar in Vancouver, and the conclusion of her interview is that I’m the nerdiest non-believer of them all. First teddy bear, now nerd — someday I want an interview to end with the idea that I’m fierce, heroic, and manly.

Not going to happen, I know.

Oh, and I got the dreaded dinner guest question, and I picked Lenin (architect of the Russian Revolution), Darwin (you know him), and Charles XII of Sweden (probably the most impulsive and ferocious leader ever), because they’re all interesting fellows, and the battle at the dinner table would be epic. Charles XII would win, of course. If I just wanted a quiet dinner conversation, it would have been Darwin, Peter Kropotkin, and Aldo Leopold, but my 3 initial picks were designed for maximal chaos.

No, wait…there would be more chaos if I substituted Richard Goldschmidt for Darwin. Need to revise my dinner list now.

Skatje is revealing all of the family secrets! I’m going to have to track her down in far-off Madison and superglue her fingers together…right after I track down all the disgusting boys who are calling her “hot” and thump ’em up a bit.

I was interviewed by Connie Barlow and Michael Dowd for their Inspiring Naturalism podcast. Dowd is the fellow who wrote Thank God for Evolution!, which I reviewed a while back. It was a slightly askew interview, but that made it fun.

I’m still trying to recover. I gave two talks on Friday, one in Abbotsford and the other at Vancouver CFI, which wasn’t hard — it was just fun. And then they took us out for a night on the town, and we shut down two bars, and we only got back to our hotel at almost 4am. This was some kind of record for stamina. I also had the TrophyWife™ with me for a change, and now she’s got the impression that these kinds of late night shenanigans are routine on my out-of-town jaunts.

There’s one preliminary account of the event so far; everything was taped and will probably end up on youtube someday. More photos can be found via Fred Bremmer.

I am pleased to report that the godless heathens of Seattle, including the likes of Ophelia Benson (who, I learned, was once bitten by a gorilla, and thereby acquired the superpowers of strength, ferocity, and calm) and Dana Hunter, know how to close out a bar. Once again, a horde of cheerful chatty atheists had to be shooed out at closing time.

Too many to list showed up, but several of the previously less voluble have agreed to comment more. Here is their chance: introduce yourselves!

One of the giant panels I was on at Convergence is now a podcast at the Secular Buddhist. It’s got me, Bug Girl, Jennifer Ouellette, Lyra Lynx, Maria Walters, Jen Mana, Ted Meissner, Debbie Goddard, Carrie Iwan, and Dave Walbridge, and I’m already worn out just listing them. It was also very well attended: SF conventions are hotbeds of godlessness.