Chest pains, Powerbook and video games (oh my!)

[giza]

I'll start this LJ off by elaborating on the doctor visit that I previously mentioned. Last Thursday, I started having chest pains in the left side of my chest. Now I'm a 28 year old guy sliding downhill towards 30. Chest pains are about the last thing I want to think of at this age. :-) Fortunately, they weren't very strong, and exercise didn't make them any worse. In fact, I only felt them whenever I would take in a deep a breath. This ruled out a heart attack, but a little Googling pointed out that there could be a lot of other things responsible for such pains. Among them are: lung infections, broken ribs, and "warning signs of a heart attack". Not fun.

So I visited Dr. K on Saturday morning, and he did his usual thing which involved asking a questions, then prodding different parts of my chest. It turned out that I have an inflamed tendon on my left pectoral muscle. In something that sounds like it's straight out of an episode of Beavis and Butthead, I "pulled one of my pecs". Dr. K further explained that the reason it doesn't hurt at the gym is because the muscle is being stretched. But after it had a few days to contract, that's when the pain set in. Very interesting. Treatment is resting the muscle, which means I need to avoid the pectoral fly at the gym, which works that muscle exclusively. I can still do other upper body exercises, however.

Regarding my Powerbook, as I mentioned in the comments of my previous post, the problem went away after I wiped the PRAM. I also fired up TechTool Deluxe and did a complete surface scan of my hard drive, as well as random seek tests and that sort of thing. No problems were found. I'm just going to keep doing backups of my data regularly, and be happy that I still have 2.5 years of AppleCare warranty protection left. :-)

I've also been giving my hard drive a good test by downloading Slackware CDs via BitTorrent. :-) My old desktop machine (a P3-450) is rather slow under RedHat 9.0, whereas it was much faster when running RedHat 6.2 I'm going to try putting Slackware on that machine and see how it helps with the speed. I also like the fact that their packaging system is really simple, just tarfiles. :-)

Since this was my first weekend that had me "free" of any sort of work concerns (or concerns on my website) for some months, I decided to well, do nothing productive. To that end, I went and bought Metal Gear Solid 3 and spent a good chunk of time playing that. MGS3 has the most amazing game engine I've seen to date, and a great story. I like stories that are based on real events. It makes them seem much more interesting.

[Edit: Oh yeah, I also bought Groundhog Day this weekend and watched it for the first time. What a funny movie. And it's really deep, too. I need to watch it over and over a few times.]

Comments

[melskunk.livejournal.com]

I occasionally get pec CRAMPS! So I get the chest pain, and find I have to stretch it out by breathing really, really deeply.
God only knows why.

Glad it wasn't serious for you

[rustitobuck.livejournal.com]

I loved Groundhog Day as well.

I'm glad your PowerBook is feeling better. Doh, I should have suggested this...yeah, see, when you reset the PRAM, what you probably also did was reset the Power Management Unit, a little 6800-based processor that is always on. It handles all the power control for the computer. If it gets a little headache, it can really screw things up.

My last chest pains were due to a really badly aligned rib. My chiropractor fixed it. See, there's a rib joint at the sternum, and a bad enough misalignment can cause pain there.

[giza.livejournal.com]

Are you sure? According to the Apple docs I read, resetting the Power Management Unit is a seperate operation. Hmm. I had no idea that the PMU was an entirely seperate processor, though. That explains quite a bit.

[balinares.livejournal.com]

> Oh yeah, I also bought Groundhog Day this weekend and watched it for the
> first time. What a funny movie. And it's really deep, too.

It's a Harold Ramis movie. Harold Ramis is GOOD.

> I need to watch it over and over a few times.

You do that. ^^

[tailen.livejournal.com]

Groundhog Day is definitely a great classic.
I've no idea how many times I've watched it by now, because of the repetition in the story. Maybe I've really only seen it once...?

[swift-fox.livejournal.com]

Glad the deal with the pain in your chest turned out to be something less critical and will heal with time.

*Hugs*

Swifty Fox

[nius.livejournal.com]

Good to hear your laptop and chesttop are in good shape :) I was torrenting those Slackware CDs yesterday too... not that I'll ever bother installing them, but it was cool to watch my machine push 1.5 megabits up to other users XD

[giza.livejournal.com]

"Geek tested, church (http://www.subgenius.com/) approved!"

[music4fun.livejournal.com]

A little deju-vu with your chest pains. I also first had chest pains about your age..and thought for sure it was signs of a heart attack. Of course, like you, it was a pulled pec. Back then the first thing was to dope you up with anti-inflammatory drugs like they gave to race horses. Guess it worked, I'm still here. Though sometimes I still manage to pull a pec but now it's just Advil and rest.