I now understand when they say, “I didn’t know if it was heartburn, or a heart attack.”

Prior to now, I’d always thought: How do you fuck that up? One features your stomach belching up acid into your throat tubes, and the other involves your heart. Attacking you. With a rusted length of conduit, and a hunk of concrete at the bottom.

Flash back to Monday night.

I decide to make it “Two Soup Tuesday,” even though it’s Monday. I am not beholden to the “days of the week” like you other mortals. I whip up some mint-pea soup, and I heat up the leftovers to a hot cauliflower curry soup. We eat. It’s delicious.

And then an oily, angry knot of weasels nests in my chest and starts eating the tender meats around the right side of my heart.

Seriously, it felt like someone was stitching a knife blade into my body.

Now, a clarification: as you may or may not know, I’m a hypochondriac. Not a severe one, and I’m aware of it, so it helps. But I get a twinge of pain, and my first thought is “cancer.” I get a cut that grows pink and puffy, and I jump to “necrotizing fasciitis.” Normally, I tamp the thought down, because I know it’s coming up from Crazytown. (Of course, this leads to a reverse Cry Wolf scenario — am I so paranoid about my hypochondria that I’ll dismiss important symptoms because of it? “I’m vomiting fire and peeing out some kind of irritating white powder. I’m sure I’m just overreacting.”)

So, when I get a stabbing chest-pain, my first thought is — heart cancer!

[scrippet]

THE RATIONAL CENTER OF MY BRAIN
No such thing as “heart cancer,” numb nuts.

THE USUALLY NOT-SO-RATIONAL PART OF MY BRAIN
Hah! You and your rationality! Is too, is too! Cocky prick!

THE RATIONAL CENTER OF MY BRAIN
Oh. Well. Then it’s probably heart cancer then. Nice knowing you.

[/scrippet]

Of course, the thing I didn’t know at the time was, I’d basically concocted a perfect storm for heartburn in my dumb little body. I already take omeprazole for my acid reflux (though it never comes with pain; I don’t experience actual heartburn), but over the weekend, ehhh, let’s just say I forgot to take those pills. And then I eat mint and hot curry. Hot curry sets my stomach on fire, and I figured, “Hey, mint will cool it down. Mint is like Billy Dee Williams in my guttyworks.” Ehh, no. Mint has this effect on your esophageal sphincter (my wife will tell you that the esophageal sphincter is “the butthole of your throat”), and it relaxes it so it becomes like a slack-jawed mouth or a busted elastic strip in old undies. While I was cooking (with two types of mint, I’ll add — applemint, and chocolate mint), I’m sitting there chowing down on the stuff like it’s popcorn. What I’m saying is, I ingested a super-basket of mint.

With my throat’s-own-asshole yawning wide, all that hot curry death acid now has the chance to geyser back up into my body.

Where, of course, it starts to stab me without remorse.

So, I figure, okay, this isn’t me dying, probably. I go about my night. I ingest a few Tums. It quiets down.I go for a walk, walk a mile-and-a-half.

But then, 9pm? It slams me again. Once more, the Thuggee death cult that I ingested is running roughshod within my chest. I eat more Tums. And then I go to bed — because, y’know, the best position for acid to attack your esophagus is supine.

Sleep, then, fails to find me for the first half of the night, because I have bumblebees and earwigs doing a party in the area around my heart. The pain is enough to keep me awake (or wake me up should I foolishly drift off to the suburbs of Slumberopolis), and this is all compounded by the whispering, chuckling voice of my hypochondria, which says things like, “This isn’t normal, you know. Heartburn doesn’t last all night. You’re dying! Like Billy Mays! He had an awesome beard! You have an awesome beard! You’re fucked. Heart cancer, buddy. Heart cancer.”

Three unpleasant hours of sleep later, I awaken, and the pain has only barely dulled. I wonder: should I just go to the emergency room? My wife, the bastion of compassion (and, mind you, the smart and practical one in this marriage), reminds me that the emergency room costs big bank even though we have insurance, and tells me that I’m not dying, and that I’m a dumbass (she knows I have the hypochondria thing rocking, but once more, the Reverse Cry Wolf thing rears its head — at some juncture, she’s going to be all like, “Stop it, you’re overreacting, you’re not dying,” and then ten minutes later, my head will rupture like a pudding-filled balloon). Instead, I listen to my wife’s prudent (and inevitably accurate) advice. I make a doctor’s appointment.

And this is all without coffee, because coffee will not be a soothing balm.

And I needs my coffee.

The long and the short of it is, the doctor thinks I’m an idiot. They did an EKG (yay, shaving my chest), heart was normal, so the only answer left right now is, “Hey, way to not take your heartburn meds then eat mint and hot curry, and then go exercise on a vigorous walk. Gee, I wonder what the problem is, beside you being a shithead?”

I go home, it starts to calm (though even now, I still have twinges of the esophageal pain), but I then begin to suffer a walloping headache, probably because I didn’t sleep, I’ve been anxious, and I had no coffee. This is, of course, the perfect time to have a conference call with the writing partner and the Big TV Producer about our TV project, right? Yeah! Did that, and through gravelly, acid-sprayed vocal chords I managed to participate. Post-call, I just disconnected from the world. Watched half of that Warehouse 13 show (not bad, didn’t realize it’s Jane Espenson’s baby, SyFy is a fuckin’ retarded name change), then lost consciousness and all meaning.

Now, here I am, telling you about it. And I’m drinking coffee to cover the Zantac and Tylenol that just went into my belly.

What I’m trying to tell you is, heartburn sucks, and it can definitely feel like your heart is attacking you.