OT: my first ambulance ride

<snipped form an e-mail... too lazy to retype it>

Well, I just got released from Yale New Haven Hospital's cardiac ward last

night My heart function is all good but the best they can guess is they 
can't rule out pericarditis, which is an inflammation of the sack around
the 
heart. Trying to figure out how I got it, the best guess is that I picked
up 
a fungal infection doing the demolition in that basement remodel I'm
doing. 
The first couple days of the job (way back in May) were nasty demolition 
ripping out moldy Sheetrock and junk. I could feel the mold s****es taking
up 
residence in my head but didn't expect them to find my pericardium.
Then, of course, it didn't help doing nine days straight of moving two 
households worth of stuff solo with the motogroove van. I got myself
really 
worn down and exhausted which probably weakened my immune system and
whammo! 
I had all the classic symptoms of a heart attack (starting in the
shoulders 
and moving into my whole chest), got my first ambulance ride ever, had my 
heart catheterized through my groin, and an angiogram and  other cool
stuff 
like echo cardiogram...
Then yesterday morning the plug popped or leaked at my femoral artery and
I 
started bleeding into a hematoma which I was lucky to notice quickly and
it 
only got to about the size of a tennis ball. Much worse and I'd have been 
off to emergency ER but they were able to fix me up by putting a giant
clamp 
(femostop, http://www.radi.se/home.aspx?n=44&m=6&s=21&r=1)
around my
waist. 
That trick required me to lay flat and still for about 5 hours which sent
my 
bad back into pain of the 9/10 magnitude, bad enough pain that morphine 
didn't help even a little.
Anyway, I'm out. I'm alive, and actually pretty damned healthy. But I'm
not 
looking too hard for the next basement remodel. A change might do me good.