Tonight (Sunday night/Monday morning), I had my first severe chest pain while at the office. I'm sure this is related to having gone off the chain this past Friday (our luncheon) and weekend (as I polished off leftovers). Carbs, I now realize, can literally kill me if I'm not careful, so since I have less than a month to repair my numbers before my next hospital visit, this coming week is going to be extra-stringent. But what I really want to talk about is what happened tonight.
I was working at the second-floor office, trying to catch up (or not get behind) on the latest project, when it suddenly became hard to breathe, and a familiar—but stronger than usual—crushing sensation arose in my chest. I began to wonder whether this was the beginning of a bona fide heart attack, and as I mentally cast about for solutions, I realized that my nitroglycerin tablets were back at the apartment—totally useless to me.
At the same that I was experiencing chest pains, my colon had roused itself and begun to sing the opening measures of an opera that I knew would eventually become unstoppable unless I did something. As I've done when any sort of disaster has struck me while walking across Korea, I thought to myself, One problem at a time, and decided to see whether I could make it down the hallway to the restroom. I made it, but at a very slow, breathless pace. Once in the restroom, I moved down to the lone Western-style toilet, opened the cubicle door... and saw the whole thing had been smeared in shit (all this has happened before and will happen again). I don't know why the kids who attend class in this building insist on doing something so fucked up, but there it was—third-world behavior from first-world children who didn't give a rat's ass about other people who might need the toilet. I want to take these kids, put their heads on a flat table of stone, and do a Gallagher on them, sledgehammering their skulls like ripe watermelons for being so inconsiderate. At the very least, I'd force them at gunpoint to clean the toilet with their tongue. Then I'd Gallagher them.
Because it was close to 11:40 p.m., I knew the first-floor toilet was walled off by a descending metal screen that the guards always lower at 9 p.m. That meant I had to go up to the third-floor restroom. Breathless and chest-pained as I was, I paused, then slowly made the climb to the third floor, each flight of the climb feeling like an eternity. I shambled into the restroom, holding back the urge to faint, opened the door to the Western-style cubicle... and beheld with dismay that this cubicle, too, looked as if it had suffered a mortar attack from an army using shit as its primary weapon. It literally looked like an explosion: coprological speckles were everywhere—in the toilet bowl and all over the cubicle walls. What the fuck do Korean students eat to produce such lusty detonations?
Time to reprioritize. I had run out of toilets, I still needed to shit, and I was still wondering whether this was my first-ever heart attack. One thing at a time. The new priority was to get home so I could shit and self-medicate. I went back to the second floor, rested on a seat next to Woori Bank (which is also on our floor), then somehow managed to shuffle back down to my office. Once inside, I concentrated on just resting, ignoring the pounding demon inside my colon, raging to get out. I knew I didn't have it in me to use the subway (too many stairs both down and up), so my only option was to go out to the main street and flag down a cab. So I closed up shop inside the office, having brought my work to a clear stopping point. I turned off the air filter and A/C, washed my dishes (I'd eaten dinner at the office), switched off the office and kitchenette lights, and locked our company's main door. I painfully descended the steps to the first floor and followed the only available path for exiting the building.
Once out, I somehow crossed the long parking lot and got to the main street without fainting. I was then lucky enough to flag down a cab that came my way within a minute of my arriving at the curb. I told the cabbie to take me to Daecheong Tower, and off we went. I thought only about nitroglycerin along the way. The urge to shit wasn't as bad as I'd feared, and I made it to my apartment building without exploding inside the car. The cabbie himself was sullen and quiet for the entire ride; when I told him to please turn left at the Daecheong Station intersection to drop me right in front of my building, he said nothing in response. He only became talkative right as I was leaving; I thanked him and wished him a good day, and he offered a grunt in response. (I've noticed, on these evening rides, that the cabbies now increase their fares before midnight; at a guess, they up their rates at 11 p.m.)
I shuffled toward my building, briefly considering stopping at the public restroom in the building's lobby, but I mentally said fuck that and went to the elevator, hitting the button for the 14th floor and enduring the ride up. It was nighttime and quiet, just after midnight. I quietly gasped my way down the long hallway to my apartment, stepped inside, did my usual just-got-home ritual of emptying my pockets and washing my hands, then moved over to the bathroom and gave vent to the fury within. It turned out to be a pretty standard, boilerplate shit, which may be why I didn't feel the usual pre-evacuation desperation. One thing I grabbed before I sat on the throne was my little bottle of nitroglycerin tablets. I managed to get the bottle out of the Ziploc bag with one hand and unscrew the cap with one hand; I then managed to coax a single pill out, and I gratefully stuck it under my tongue and let it melt there. There didn't seem to be any effect for the first thirty seconds, but after a couple minutes, I noticed my thoughts had become much happier, my breathing had gotten smoother, and the whole world seemed to be on a more even keel. And no more chest pain. Those pills work.
All in all, that whole disaster felt like a close one, in more ways than one. Of all the outcomes I'd like to avoid, I don't want people to find my corpse with underwear around the ankles and signs that I'd been whacking off to porn. And I also don't want people to find me on the toilet like poor Elvis, fat and dead, with a load of shit in the toilet bowl and a look of simultaneous triumph and tragedy on my face. Tonight, the porn thing wouldn't have happened, but I have to wonder how close I'd come to the second scenario. After I cleaned up from my zesty session, I did a load of laundry and decided tonight might be a good night for nocturnal self-medication, just as a way to make sure my blood vessels have beneficent chemicals washing through them so I'm assured of waking up in the morning.
This incident makes me realize that that one YouTuber may have had the right idea about dieting: do just a cheat meal, not a cheat day. And in my case—commit my dietary sins on only one calendar day instead of spreading the misbehavior over three days just because there are leftovers that need to be eaten. Either throw the leftovers away from now on (and get better at cooking the correct amount to serve a group of people and have no leftovers) or give the leftovers away on the day of. Something has to improve.
And maybe think about going hardcore carnivore so as to avoid carbs almost completely.
