3/10/2005 05:43:00 PM|||Joe|||Ok. This week's stunning revelation:

My chest pain was acid reflux.

Seriously, this is a shock for me. My chest has been hurting so bad in recent months that it's been hard to even act normal. I thought it might be stress. There's some crazy stuff going on right now which, while it doesn't directly involve me, nevertheless does affect me, and I thought that that was a big part of it.

Of course, stress does aggravate reflux.

But still, I am surprised. This pain has been so bad that I was sure it was either psychosomatic or something worse. I've had reflux for a long time, but the pain was always very specific. This pain has been different. In fact, now I'm not even sure I was really having panic attacks last year. It could have been brought on by the reflux. Which, incidentally, aggravates asthma as well.

Actually, asthma and reflux apparently aggravate each other. Great.

So how do I know that it's reflux? I went to a doctor last friday. While describing my problems, I mentioned that I had had some bad problems with reflux before. He gave me some stuff to take at night.

Huge improvement. There's still some mild, dull pain, but nothing like the acute pain I was feeling all last week.

Now here's the real stumper — I didn't want to admit to this, but the chest pain started after I quit smoking. I even considered starting back up to see if it would help. What's that about?|||111050548497035077|||Chest Pain