Matters of the heart can sometimes be literal. So when I tell my doc that I am tired all of the time and that my heart is “hurting,” she suggests an anti-depressant.

“I’m not depressed,” I say, with a note of defiance in my voice. “My chest feels tight, I’m out of breath when I walk, and my heart hurts.” (Ok, I haven’t had a good date in a while, which might depress the average girl, but this is different.)

I am insistent, so twenty-four hours prior to my “nuclear myocardial perfusion stress test,” I’ve been told that I can’t have coffee or chocolate, so I am already in a bad mood (NOW I’m depressed!). My two favorite things are now forbidden. I am getting a migraine, but I can’t take an aspirin. They are off limits too. So I decide to sleep it off and wake up groggy and late, suck down a few nuked eggs before my deadline of 9:00 a.m. (I can’t eat for four hours before this test and it’s already 8:55.) I need water to wash these puppies down, but as I read my instructions I see that I am only allowed a few sips. So sip I do and fast. My test is four hours away and my mouth already feels like I swallowed a sock, but I tough it out. I wonder if I can have gum or will they know that I have transgressed when I show my guilty little face at the desk? I’m hoping they have a sense of humor and cut me some slack (there is a stack of Foolish Times in the lobby, so this gives me hope).

Writers have stress too, by the way, and mine was certainly going to be tested. After signing a waiver releasing liability if I expire (I’m paying for this?) I’m marched into a room with the temperature of a meat locker and now I’m hungry, shivering, and my arm is killing me because my technician can’t get a vein start. This isn’t going well, but he seems like a nice guy so as much as I want to smack him with my good arm, I refrain. I now have track marks worthy of an overzealous heroin addict. He tries another spot and I’m hooked in and he injects a radioactive isotope (again, I’m paying for this?). And he sticks three plastic things that remind me of crop circles to my chest.

Thirty minutes later, after resting in the “lounge,” cocktails excluded, I’m allowed to use the restroom and then I’m ushered back into the cold room where my crop circles are connected to electrodes and I’m told to lie down while a robotic camera rotates around my chest. I have been told not to move, talk, or cough (of course my throat starts to close when the word cough is mentioned). Like the threatening blade of the guillotine, this machine slowly descends to a dangerously close proximity to my chest. I’m thinking evil mammogram while desperately trying not to cough. The technician asks me if I want music because I’ll be there for a while, and as I nod affirmatively, Jimmy Page riffs in the background.

“Uhhh, no thanks,” I whisper. (I’m a Zep fan, but if I can’t rock out, I don’t want to hear it.) I request the Bee-Gees “How Do You Mend a Broken Heart?” but he doesn’t have it so I opt for a total Zen-like silence and put myself to sleep for seventeen minutes (give or take).

Then back to the lounge. Now I am in serious need of a cocktail, but no luck. I get two female technicians in blue scrubs, lots of questions, and more crop circles. I’m taken back to the meat locker, one arm torturously trapped in a blood pressure strap, pick up another female tech and a doctor, and now we’re having a party. My blood pressure is typically low, but now it’s high and they turn on the treadmill and tell me to get on board after hooking up innumerable wires to the crop circles. I look like a seventh-grade science project and although I am in pretty good shape (or so I thought), this thing kicks in and I’m breaking a sweat fast. EKGs, beeps, curious faces, and the pace and incline keeps getting increased.

“How are you feeling?” one of the blue people ask. “You can relax your hands on the bar.” (She must have seen me white knuckling the thing.)

“How the hell do you think I’m feeling?? My chest is tight, I’m out of breath, and my blood pressure is rising” (relax, my ass).

“How would you rate that chest tightness on a scale of one to ten?” another blue person asks.

Ok. Is it safe to ask a woman who hasn’t had coffee or chocolate for over twenty-four hours, or food for over four, who has a sore arm and has just had her skin rubbed raw by a smurf in scrubs, to rate her discomfort?

Luckily the doc walks in before I can spurt superlatives all over the front of the interrogating tech.

“We’re going to turn the speed up now and when you are a minute away from passing out, just let us know.” The test is set up so that when you feel like you can’t go another second, they inject you with more isotopes and make you stay on for another agonizing minute.

“You’re doing fine…almost done,” the doc says.

I can’t breathe, I can’t talk, I’m tipping over, I want food, I want chocolate, I want coffee, and I want a smurf bat.

“Now we’re going to give you a little snack,” I hear one of them say.

“Can you IV it to me? I’m too freaking tired to eat it.”
So before I go back to the morgue (cold room), the electrodes and wires are disconnected, my crop circles (all except three) are ripped off my aching body, and I’m escorted back into the lounge where I’m given my choice of cheddar cheese or peanut butter-filled crackers with a tomato juice chaser (sans vodka). Not my idea of a Bloody Mary and appetizers. What the hell kind of lounge is this anyway?

I’m nuclearly stressed now, so I guess I passed the test. I have Kryptonite (or something like it) running through my veins and have the crop circles on my chest to prove it, and I’ll probably melt my toilet bowl tonight. I was told not to come in contact with the stool, but the only stool I’m going to be coming in contact with is the one in a real lounge!

Copyright 2008 Robyn Justo

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Robyn Justo is a freelance writer who is living, breathing, and learning the new rules of dating over 40. Experienced, but by no means an expert, she shares the frustrations, triumphs, and general hysteria of single life on the Monterey Peninsula. “The Expiration Date” addresses the lighter side of dating later in life. The names have been changed to protect the innocent (and the guilty). Robyn also occasionally hosts local social events for those brave-hearted single folks who actually have the courage to come out of the house.