My hypochondria strikes again. Ever since the last ER scare, I just haven't been 100% satisfied that all systems are go. And you always hear about those people that have like a persistent problem and are told again and again and again that nothing is wrong, only to find out their own intuition was right and there's some huge devastating problem. I really don't like to think of this as a psychosis because I'm not completely obsessed, but when I sit at the computer on a Monday morning with my fingers on my pulse and count that every fourth beat of my heart is skipped, I get concerned. I could ignore it and see what happens or I could take advantage of my totally bomb health insurance while I've still got it and go get checked out. (Because my company is switching insurance providers, not because Obama is taking it away.)

So I scheduled an appointment that day for a stress test. And let me just tell you, it was awesome. Everyone should do it just for fun. Like I did. You go in and get hooked up to all the regular EKG stuff that I'm practically bored with these days. They take a bunch of baseline measurements and then you lay on a table and they get out the ultrasound machine to take a sonogram of your heart. I was able to lie on the table and watch each part of my heart expand and contract and could see each little valve flip open to let the blood through. They even used the same technology used in a doppler radar to measure the speed of the blood as it went through my heart. It was so damn cool. The guy even showed me my lungs and my liver and if I took a deep breath in, they would shift my heart over and throw it out of focus.

Then you run on a treadmill until you hit like 190 bpm on your heart rate. So I was truckin it up a steep incline. And as soon as you reach it, you jump on the table and take some more ultrasounds. Basically, no doctor has reviewed my results, but the technician said everything looked completely healthy and normal. I asked him about skipped beats and he told me something I had never known before. The heart isn't controlled by the brain. It's the only organ capable of producing its own contractions completely independently. So even though it should always work, occasionally it can screw up because of a million different reasons. He has a friend whose heart skips beats when she drinks orange juice. The body is a complicated machine. So if you heart messes up some how, it is capable of realizing this, and "skipping a beat" so that it can completely drain the blood out and start the process over. And sometimes this causes a large pause, and because of different pressures all around, it can cause discomfort or pain. And as long as every beat isn't a skipped beat over the course of an hour, there is no reason to be alarmed when it happens. Even though, for the record, this has been happening to me for a few hours at a time at least once a week. So I think it was okay to go get checked.

Anyway, it was flippin sweet and I encourage everyone to do it.