Please forgive my absence last week. I think it was the first time I’ve missed a column since I started writing Spaghetti for Breakfast five years ago. But Gord was not feeling well and I had to devote the full power of my relentlessness into forcing him to seek medical attention while keeping him from drinking any coffee until after said medical attention was properly sought.

I’m not sure which one was harder.

Gord needs his caffeine in the morning and trying to get him to function without it is not an easy task. And he is quite firm in his preference for the hot liquid variety. My suggestion that he ingest his caffeine in the same manner in which I did was met with adamant refusal and a comment that if coffee wasn’t advisable for him at that particular moment, then a double chocolate donut wasn’t likely to be a good idea either.

I knew he was right despite my reluctance to admit that donuts are ever anything but a good idea. Either way, I hid the coffee pot.

The battle to keep him from his coffee was difficult. The battle to get him to the hospital was epic.

Let me begin by saying that if you are a married man over the age of 40 and you tell your wife that you are experiencing pains in your chest, you cannot discount the very real possibility that she may react.

She may suggest that you sit down.

She may suggest that you describe any additional symptoms.

She may suggest that you get your butt to the emergency room at the hospital as quickly as she can shove you out the door.

Gord was already sitting down. He gave me a quick run through of his other symptoms but immediately countered a trip to the emergency room with his own diagnosis:

“It’s not my heart. I don’t need to go to the hospital.”

Before he could finish saying the word hospital, I had pulled all the medical books off our bookshelf, had the Heart and Stroke Foundation and Healthy Ontario websites up on the computer, and had completed a call to Telehealth Ontario.

“They said you need to go to the hospital,” I announced.

“That’s what they always say no matter what you call about,” Gord answered.

“Yes, you’d think they’d show a little more variety than ‘Get him to the emergency room as fast as you can’ when dealing with a man with chest pain,” I muttered.

I called his attention to the heart attack symptoms listed in the many sources laid out in front of me. Gord possessed only one of them.

“What did I tell you?” he said. “I only have one. I can wait and see our family doctor.”

“No you can’t. Because the one symptom you have is chest pain - as in a pain in your chest - as in the area that your heart resides. And they may not show it to scale on the symptom check list, but the box beside chest pain is 10 times larger than the boxes next to nausea, sweating and lightheadedness. You get those three things just being a passenger when I drive. “

“Have you told anyone else besides the Telehealth nurse what’s going on?”

“No... but they all said that you should go to the hospital.”

Eventually Gord’s discomfort, combined with my relentless inquires of “How do you feel now? How about now? How are you now?”, finally prompted him to agree to a trip the emergency room - that and the fact that when I called to make a doctor’s appointment they said to take him to the emergency room.

Upon arrival Gord was hooked up to a cardiac machine. With much relief we were informed a few hours later that a heart attack was not the cause of his pain. He could leave the hospital as long as he followed up with a visit to our family doctor.

The drive home was interrupted only by a quick detour to Tim Horton’s. As I made the final turn onto our street I heard a gasp of pain come from Gord. I hit the brakes and yelled “Hold on we’re going back to Emerg!”

“I don’t need Emerg.” Gord called. “I need a towel. You bumped my arm with your elbow. There’s coffee in my lap!”

You know, that kind of thing doesn’t happen with a chocolate donut.