I was checked into the hospital on Friday and told that they had to perform a catheterization to verify and/or fix the problem. The problem was that they didn’t have the staff available for that on weekends except for emergencies. If someone else had an emergency and they called in the staff for that, then they could turn around and perform the catheterization on me. Otherwise, we had to wait until Monday.

All through this, from Friday morning through Sunday, I was on a “nothing by mouth” diet for extended (12+ hours) because I might have surgery in the next few hours.

On Friday night, they had me starving in case someone else had a bad day and needed the on-call staff. By noon on Saturday, they said that I could eat since they weren’t going to call anyone that day.

Around 10:30 on Sunday, they announced that someone else was having a bad day and needed emergency cardiac surgery. This meant that they were dragging in the on-call cardiology staff and were going to perform the cath in a couple of hours. I’ve never been so happy that someone else was having a heart attack. (The doctors told me that this guy actually had a good day because they saved him.)

2 hours later, I was told that my ticker was fine, the stress test was a false positive, and I could check out by early evening.