January 28, 2009
My heart doctor asked me yesterday what the pain level is in my chest. I told him that depends. A friend of mine is a paramedic and he told me about going on a call to a trailer house in Prescott Valley. The medical responders found a man lying on the floor of his kitchen clutching his chest. The medic leaned in close and asked him, on a scale of one to ten, what the pain level was, and the man blurted out, "A six."

And then he died.

Men are conditioned to under report pain. I was reading about the Steelers football team and how 20 of the the recent championship team are already dead. Several had heart attacks at a very young age. One guy, 49, came into his wife and said, "I'm either coming down with a bad cold or I'm having a heart attack."

And then he died.

So, I said to my doctor, "It's about a one." He looked at me knowingly and said, "We better run a stress test on you."

"See what will happen if you don't stop biting your nails?"
—Will Rogers, to his niece, on seeing the Venus de Milo