For about the past two weeks, I've been having strange feelings in my bosom. Not feelings of longing or love or anything like that. I felt my actual heart doing weird shit.

The best I can explain is that I was having butterflies in my chest. After having these, I can say with confidence and conviction that I much prefer to have them in my stomach. I'd get lightheaded, have some shortness of breath, be a bit sensitive to light and sometimes feel like throwing up.

When it first happened, I chalked it up to a lack of sleep. It was a Monday and I'd worked the Sunday night before. I only got about two hours of sleep. OK, my heart is telling me it likes more sleep, I thought. I'm right there with you, heart. I love me some sleep. But then it came back the next day. And the next. Then it wouldn't happen. It'd be there the next day. Each day with varying degrees of severity. Sometimes not that much. Other times, I started to draft my Last Will and Testament.

So after about a week and a half, I decided to go see a cardiologist. I went this past Thursday and as I was sitting in the waiting room, with my heart beating completely normal, I thought to myself, I know it's not going to do it while I'm here, the doctor is going to think I'm a jackass wasting his time, and he's going to kick me out of his office and tell me to never come back.

I'm called in and I'm asked to remove my shirt as they prepare for an electrocardiogram. I lay down and this guy comes in, who I guess is a nurse, and he tells me he is going to have to "shave some parts" of me. If I knew that part of this effort to potentially save my life would involve a fella shaving my chest, I would have thought twice. So he has this dry razor and just shaves little sections of my chest.

I did not like that. Not just for the fact of having someone shave my chest, but I felt pretty helpless. All of the sudden I was feeling like an old man. Sure I've had health problems before, but this was the heart. Serious shit. I've only got one of these. I had done a lot of searches on WebMD and crap, and for the most part, it seemed like it'd end up being something not too serious, but still. When your heart starts to feel weird, it is a bit scary.

So they do the EKG. I wait a little longer. The cardiologist comes in and I tell him what is wrong. He tells me that there is nothing wrong with the EKG. My heart beats a little faster than normal, but it's no big deal. Now I look like a chump. "Well, it's like it beats real fast, but then it'll skip a beat. Or sometimes it feels like it's beating really slow. At times it almost feels like it'll beat backwards. I get lightheaded, nauseous, blah blah blah. I'm dyin' doc! Ya gotta help me!"

I pretty much gave him every symptom possible. Then he says he'd like to take an ultrasound of my heart. We do that, which was pretty cool. I had flashbacks to health class where they show you how the heart operates and all that. It was pretty cool to see my own heart. I wanted to ask the doctor, "Well, is it a boy or a girl?" But he's probably heard that many times before. Although he was kind of young, so maybe he hasn't heard it that much. He looked like a guy from a crappy sitcom. I could imagine him on something like The Single Guy, or Two Guys, a Girl and a Hoagie Shop. But no. He was checking my seemingly perfectly healthy heart.

A few more tests, still nothing wrong. It's like bringing your car into the mechanic and saying, "Well, it does this shimmy. It's not doing it now, but if you saw it, you'd know."

He decides to give me a heart monitor to wear over the next 24 hours. This involves about 9 wires stuck to my chest, all connected to this box, which is about the size of an answering machine that I have to strap to my belt. I walk out of the doctor's office with wires strapped to my chest that are hanging outside my shirt, connected to a big box that is connected to my belt. I am heading for the subway at rush hour and I look like a suicide bomber. I soon realized that people don't like when you open your shirt and yell out, "Allah is great! Death to Satan! Nah, I'm just fuckin' with ya. It's a heart monitor."

Of course I wear the thing for 24 hours and my heart is running like a fine-tuned machine. Nothing. Not one beat out of order. I realize I'm just a hypochondriac and it was probably nothing.

I also realized that the worst part about this ordeal (so far) is the whole chest shaving thing. I never thought I'd have the opportunity to say to someone, "Don't you hate when a guy shaves part of your chest?" After I took off the wires and looked at my stupid partly shaved chest, I just went ahead and shaved the whole thing. I have never been so itchy in my life. And I learned this little equation:

Electric razor + accidentally hitting nipple = Yeeeooow! Motherfucker!

Well, now that you know too much about my chest, I'll stop. I will soon publish part 2 - My trip to the ER.