Friday, March 9: While going about my usual Friday business, I notice a mild pain in my chest that doesn't seem to correspond to heartburn. Over the course of the day I also notice it in my back at approximately the same front-to-back location. It never seems to spread or worse, isn't accompanied by any other symptoms, and is not even really intense enough to be annoying, much less distressing, so I pretty much ignore it.

Sunday, March 11: Arriving at my father's for the usual Sunday night overnight (because last semester I had an 8 AM class on Mondays and Dad lives closer to campus than I do), I mention that this is still going on to my father, who becomes agitated. Admittedly, by this time it's starting to freak me out a little too, even though it's still not getting any worse or doing anything really alarming. He takes me to the Emergency Department at Eastern Maine Medical Center, which longtime readers may recognize as the hospital where I spent two weeks in 2007 having the Great Brain Adventure.

There, they put me on precautionary oxygen, then run an EKG and a bunch of bloodwork. Presently a nice doctor comes in and says, "Well, your heart is fine. Your D-dimer [Ed. Note A blood factor indicating that a clot has been/is being broken down somewhere in the body] is slightly elevated, but only slightly. You might be passing a very small blood clot through your left lung." He explains that they'd have to do a chest CT scan to confirm that, but that my symptoms are such that he doesn't think calling for such a thing on an emergency basis on a Sunday evening is called for. He does schedule me to have an ultrasound on the veins in my legs to make sure I'm not rocking the hidden deep vein thrombosis down there.

Monday, March 12: I return to EMMC for the ultrasound on my legs, which is all clear. The chest pain has gone away in the night. ER doc's final conclusion, in essence: "Just one of those things, I guess. BTW, you should lose some weight."

Thursday, March 15: I see the physician assistant I go to for my primary care, to follow up on my ED visit. He paces the exam room and says, "I've been thinking about it all week and I guess you should have that chest CT. I mean, it's probably not an issue, but then again it might be, and I don't want to have to explain in court later why we didn't bother doing it." (You would have to know Randy. I've been seeing him since I was little, and that's just how his sense of humor works.)

Wednesday, March 21: I return to EMMC again for a CT angiogram. In case you're not familiar with computed tomography, this is essentially a number of X-rays taken from all around the body so that they can then be concatenated by computer into a 3D image, with an iodine solution circulating from an IV so that my blood shows up on the images (instead of being invisible as blood usually is on an X-ray).

Date unrecorded, probably the first or second week in April: Randy calls and says, "I got your chest CT results back. Your heart and lungs are all clear, but the radiologist thinks he spotted something weird near your left kidney. It's probably just a cyst. I'll book you for an ultrasound so we can confirm that it is, and if it is we'll leave it alone."

Tuesday, May 1: Upper abdominal sonogram at the hospital here in Millinocket. May 1 is the Tuesday of finals week; since all my finals last semester were on Monday, the semester is over for me by then, which is why we booked it that day.

Date unrecorded, prob