There is a cruel irony to having been isolated for nearly a year due to this pandemic to wake up on a Saturday morning with chest pains. I can count the number of external people I’ve been in contact with in a non-socially distanced manner on one hand (three), and even that’s a stretch.

Funny thing about chest pains they don’t care about your social distance count. No, turns out they don’t care about anything other than putting you in a foul and somewhat dire spiral about one’s mortality. As if the pandemic hadn’t caused enough of that.

No, it wasn’t a heart attack thought of course that where your mind goes. The symptoms didn’t match up though I am looking at 41 in the face next month and with the stress I’ve experienced over the course of a career you apparently just can’t rule it out. Anxiety and a series of panic attacks is the likely culprit, which I can’t say I’ve experienced before and are rather terrifying.

Regardless I find myself now having to do something I’d rather not do in the current variant-laden phase of the pandemic: I’m going to have to go get checked out. This of course instantly makes my chest tighten up, which then leads to me using the heart monitor that Monica bought some time ago (pre-pandemic it turns out).

65-ish beats per minute, not bad for a 40 year old me. Not exactly my peak physical condition of young me, but hey, at least my heart appears to not be trying to beat out of my chest in this instance.

We’ll see how things progress. I think in the meantime I’ll cut back on that pot of coffee habit I’ve ostensibly developed over this pandemic.