We don’t go to the doctor unless bleeding externally or something wrong with your junk 
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My 95% blocked artery was discovered when I went to the emergency room for kidney stones. They did an EKG as they always do for men that meet the description ( pudgy and middle aged). They didn’t like what the saw and gave me several more tests. They didn’t like any of those either. The doctors figured I had an arterial blockage but didn’t know how severe until doing imaging.
Oh yeah, I discharged the stones eventually though my junk. That didn’t feel good either. Now I drink LOTS of water.
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I had two stone episodes (hopefully never again) and they both happened at night. I’ve had some significant pain events in my life but that was orders of magnitude above and beyond. Some years back a coworker had an attack while driving and crashed. Fortunately, he was OK. I couldn’t understand that until I suffered through one.
Fortunate to have caught the blockage before something more severe happened. I worked for a medical device manufacturer for almost 20 years designing all kinds of patient monitoring equipment. Spent quite a few years on ECG development. We used simulators to test the algorithms but as a routine, we hooked everyone up at some point to get a wider sample size. One time, a guy lit up all the alarms and we thought there was some bug in the hardware/software but it turned out he had significant issues and had had several attacks without realizing how bad it was. Talk about lucky as well. I probably still have a 12 lead machine around here…
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I had 3 stents placed, including the “widow maker”, do i get a prize?
My wife had her heart on her chest at age 41 due to a dethatched, but scared over, ascending aortic artery that is now manmade (forgot what they call it) ascending aortic artery… She is damn lucky to be alive, took countless numbers of ER trips with chest pains and BP readings hitting 210-220/100+, like 10 months before she was sent to a heart surgeon, while under the care of 2 cardiologists trying to figure it out…
Yeah, the new ER wing was named after her after we, and the ins company, spent so much money there that year…
Ohh and to top it off, her lungs wouldn’t restart again for over 9.5 hours after surgery, she was told that if she ever smoked again, she wouldn’t make it… That was a long day, got their at 4:30am, opened her up at 6am and finally took her off the heart and lung machine at 9:30pm…
But I lost the bet, I told the Dr she didn’t have a heart… 
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Kidney stones were the second most painful malady I’ve had. My last hernia repair was complicated because my cardiologist insisted that I start regular doses of Warfarin the afternoon of the operation. Big mistake, but this cardiologist was a half witted jackass. Amazing that someone so stupid could become the head doctor in a practice. Anyway, I had internal bleeding. This had to be a 10/10 pain and I was on oxycodone. I called the surgeon and complained of the unbearable pain and they said, essentially, life’s hard, buzz off. The only way to control it was to sit absolutely still on the couch. It turned out that my blood iron was down to 18. It was measured after I was back at work and walked up one flight of steps to my office, and half way up I couldn’t catch my breath. I was taking air in, but i was still out of breath. Smarty pants doctor ordered a Holter monitor for me but one of his colleagues suggested a blood test after I drove directly to the ER. That’s when I found out how low by blood ire on was. Iron pills for a month cured that problem.
Absolutely!! You get to live.
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You too, Dave.
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Well, with bleeding it’s still optional…I mean is it bad enough that the bone is showing?
Glad she’s still here and that you are too to tell us about it!
Hopefully the prize is you won’t have to do it again. My dad had three stents placed on 2 ooccasions before needing triple bypass, and by the time he died one of his bypasses was in need of replacement.
As far as keeping this car related, you don’t realize the muscles you use to turn a steering wheel until you have your chest sawed in half!
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My work one time had some kind of a national safety thing for a day, so I told my guys even if they cut their arm off, that I would bag it and through it in the freezer at work and then report it the next morning… 
I’m sorry to hear your wife is part of the 52 percent.
52% of what?? Please explain in more detail…
Kinda not sure what to think of that statement… 
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Around 2010, adult women surpassed men as the majority of U.S. smokers. But not because more women picked the habit up.
I had an engineer who worked for me and took a $50k cut in pay to move to the Boston area from Silicon Valley so he could afford to buy a home.
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Because of the relatively easy commute to NYC–along with very high NYC salaries–real estate in Northern NJ continues to sell at incredibly-inflated prices. Can you imagine a tiny 2-bedroom, 1-bath home selling for more than $860k? Well, one just did!
Boston isn’t as high as NYC, but we’re right up there. Here in Southern NH we’re influenced by Boston prices because we’re only 30 miles from Downtown Boston. Farther you are from Boston the cheaper the prices. Our home has more than tripled in value since we bought it over 25 years ago. Homes in the small town I grew up in in central NY are 1/4 what they are here. Northern NH home prices are half what they are in southern NH. I don’t know how a young couple can afford to buy a home in my town. Average price is over $600k. And once a home goes for sale there are 5+ bids within a few hours. Most are bidding MORE than the asking price. Single-wide trailers are selling for over $300k.
OK?? Not sure why you made that comment, I find it very unnecessary and a little rude to make a smart ass comment about another mans wife, something tells me you are much braver behind that keyboard than in real life, she hasn’t smoked since 4/13/2015, and smoking had nothing to do with her ascending aortic artery detaching and her almost dying, her heart is very healthy… BTW, her kidneys completely shut down on her a few years ago almost killing her also, ER/hospital had to do emergency dialysis, twice to get them to restart, any rude smart ass comments about that one, oh and lets not forget about the time (within a few months before or after the kidney thingy) when her lungs filled up with fluid, took 4 days in the hospital to clear them out enough to go back home…
Gezz dude, I know you shoot from the hip and all, but sometimes it is just better to keep the gun holstered then to shoot an innocent bystander… 
And to keep it car related, she got to ride in an ambulance both times, and I had to drive myself, good thing is, at the time, we lived a 1/2 miles from the hospital…
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My daughter and her husband paid $250K over asking price for the home they bought last year in Bergen County.
Dave, I don’t see Chris’s comments as being snarky. The first one about women and 52% was unclear until explained in a later post. The second one is informational. I can see why you misunderstood the posts and that would make me defensive too.
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I worked with an engineer that did the same thing. He worked in Sunnyvale, CA and moved to the DC area so that his family could buy a house near his work. A lot of people that work in the SF area live in the Central Valley. One guy I worked with drove over 100 miles one way on his commute to Palo Alto. A friend that worked in Sunnyvale said that she knew several people that plane-poooled from the Central Valley to Sunnyvale. They parked at the Ames Research Center airport and drove a beater a couple thousand feet to their building.