I woke up in the early hours with a sword through my chest.  Swear to The Almighty He Who Is Or Isn’t that while it may have not been visible, it was there.  It started from the front, over the center of my chest, plunged through, and out through my spine.  Oddly, I think my spine hurt the most.  But nothing felt awesome.  I was nauseous.  I was dizzy.  I had indigestion like I’d eaten the whole damn chicken, feathers beak and all, and not just some of its breast hours earlier.

This wasn’t the first time.  Each time I half asleep panic that I’m having a heart attack.  Each time I tell myself I’m not even 30, I drink some pink stuff, and I curse my body for about an hour when *poof* it is magically gone, as quickly as it came.  Fine.  Fine.  Sleep.  Sleep.  2AM DYING.  DYING. DYING.  3AM fine.  Sleep.  Sleep.

My body only does this in the dead of night when I’m in a sound sleep that the roof caving in couldn’t wake me from.

Clearly not a heart attack.  I’d be dead by now.

This last time I got curious and Googled the symptoms for a heart attack.  Oh.

Age ranges?  Well, do you have a heart?

Twitter, does it realistically happen to those under 30?  Oh, you know someone personally who died from one when they were 14?  Awesome.

Then oh hey, about 12 hours later, ok more like 10, but I’m starting to sound dumb here, my left shoulder started in.  Now I have chronic pain, don’t take the damn arm seriously.  Ever.  No, it doesn’t matter that it’s my right shoulder and not my left shoulder that acts up.  Chronic pain.  All joints prone.  Major weather changes at that.  OHIO!  OHIO WEATHER!  (I’m seriously not a fan of calling weather “bipolar”, btw but if I was…)

So I kept everything in mind, because I’m not dumb, but I weighed in my age and other risk factors (recently declared perfect blood pressure and cholesterol levels, but kind of sort of fat) and decided I’d give it some time.

Then with great stupidity, I ordered dinner.  The following is pretty much directly off twitter since it is quite hilarious, as long as you don’t know about the earlier heart attack symptoms.

See, when a Chinese restaurant takes the time to warn you that something is spicy, they don’t mean Wendy’s spicy chicken, spicy.  In fact, I’m fairly certain that the dish in question was more Vietnamese and less Chinese.  And the ability it gave me to breath fire, my husband informed me, was thanks to the liberal use of ghost pepper seeds.  And I can now from experience tell you that ghost pepper is named for its ability to turn diners into restless souls searching for cold water.  Water doesn’t help, just to clarify.

Also, damn that stuff was good.

And?  Not a peep from my stomach, or heart since.  See, the way I figured, it was indigestion and eating something spicy would give my stomach to chew on, or I was indeed having a heart attack and this would fix my indecision.  Either way, I’d know.

And I do know.

I know that when the Chinese restaurant takes the time to tell you something is spicy, they are referring to something more than your local fast food joint’s seasoned sandwich.