One morning about five years ago I sat blot upright at about 6:30 a.m. with this super-scary pain running through the left-middle of my body. Was I having a heart attack? Something equally bad? I had no idea. When I realized I was basically OK other than the pain, I calmed down, waited, and went to student health when they opened. They told me I either had a pulled muscle in my chest or back, or maybe I had a pinched nerve in there somewhere. The bottom line was that regardless of what was wrong, they were just going to tell me to rest it and take some ibuprofen, so it was pointless to do any tests.

Over the past several days I've had the exact same pain. I know it's nothing worse, largely because I was able to do the treadmill as usual yesterday with nothing out of the ordinary. Or, rather, I know intellectually it's nothing worse; the deviously paranoid part of me brain cannot stop thinking heart attack, even though to my understanding heart-attack-type pain doesn't go on as a dull throb for 5 days, doesn't allow you to do cardio, doesn't occasionally shoot across to your opposite shoulder, etc.

The practical upshot of this is particularly annoying--I'm fine all day, but when I lay down to sleep my mind races. I can probably count 10 nights in my entire life where I've had the legitimate , up half the night for no good reason kind of insomnia; unfortunately, four nights ago that estimate would be seven. So if you encounter me in the next several days, the odds that I'm going to be cranky and/or distance are exponentially higher than usual. Fair warning.