The PFT Story

It's February, and that means my birthday is coming up.  AGAIN.  Getting older really, really sucks.  I suppose it beats the alternative, but it still blows.  I guess I never really believed it would happen to me, so any time I run into an indicator, such as an ear hair (I didn't even know that was a thing), it chips away a little at my soul.

The weird thing is, I don't feel any different.  I still look pretty good, too.  I have all my hair, it's still brown, and I haven't gotten fat or anything.  I think of myself as the constant--it's the world around me that is changing, including that asshole in the mirror every morning when I shave.  I know that's not really the case, at least intellectually.  For the little guy in my head watching the movie of my life, it just looks like everyone else is starting to look really young.  I saw a state trooper the other day that looked about 11 years old, for instance.




Some disconcerting facts:

Let's talk about this.

1. My son is now older than I was when he was born.  When I was his age, I was actually bringing my second child home from the hospital.
2. I say things like "When I was his age..." all of the time now.
3. I have been in the Marine Corps for longer than many Marines have been alive.
4. My knees make a sound like I have a bag of gravel in each pocket when I climb stairs.
5. The doctor now sticks his finger in my asshole when I have a checkup.  This is a highly effective deterrent to checkups, by the way.
6. I heard an instrumental version of a rock song that was popular when I was in high school while in the waiting room at the doctor's office (That's before the finger.  After the finger, I just went straight home.)
7. Nose hair is relentless.
8. I find that I hold my breath and make weird grunting noises when I pick something up off the floor.
9. The two hairs that I used to pluck from the back of my shoulders have begun to recruit reinforcements.  
10. The guys on the Viagra commercials are my age.

All of these facts, when added together, can begin to soak through even the thickest layers of denial, and crack even the most bloated of egos.

The PFT Story

Here's a little story about when I first began to realize what was happening.

Every year, I am required to take a physical fitness test, or PFT, for the Marine Corps.  This test includes doing pull-ups, sit-ups, and a 3 mile run.  I am excellent at the first two, but I hate running.  While I was never exactly a speed demon, lately it has been getting much worse.  My performance isn't horrible yet, just not very good, but it now takes a monumental effort for me to be mediocre.  Keep that in mind as I set the stage for the rest of the story.

This was about a year and a half ago, while I was a student at the command and staff college.  It was a bright and sunny May day in Virginia, maybe about 65 degrees, light winds.  A wonderful day to be outside.  We started with the pull-ups.  Like I have said before, my two main talents are doing pull-ups and pointing out the shortcomings of others, so I quickly and easily knocked out the 20 dead-hang pull-ups required to get a maximum score, even though my shoulder had been bothering me, and was making some weird popping noises.  I also had little trouble with the abdominal crunches that pass for sit-ups in the Marine Corps these days.  Then came the run.

I wasn't particularly worried about the run, though I knew it would suck.  I figured it would all be over in twenty-something minutes or so, right?  I stretched a little and waited for everyone to get ready to start.  I had worn a warm-up jacket in that morning, and I stashed it next to a tree by the starting/finish line, putting my car keys and cell phone inside the pocket for safekeeping.  A few nervous seconds standing at the start waiting to go, and then the time keeper says "Go!" and we're off.

I felt fine.  I started my own stopwatch to keep track of how slow I was running, and fell in right behind one of the front runners.  I always do this.  I am an Alpha male.  My ego kicks in, and I decide suddenly that I just won't let any of these scrawny little runner-punks pass me.  So I don't, and I'm hauling ass.  This lasts about a half-mile or so before the realities of weighing over 200 pounds and being over 40 years old kick in.  I start getting out of breath and my heart rate climbs, and I basically feel like shit for however long it takes me to run the next two and a half miles.

That is the usual way I run these things.  I was actually doing pretty well, and made it nearly three-quarters of a mile at a blazing fast pace before reality kicked in.  This time however, it wasn't just the normal amount of suck.  Something strange began to happen.  I began to realize that my arm was starting to ache, and that my hand was numb.  I thought, "Oh, shit."

Heart problems definitely run in my family.  My father had his first heart attack when he wasn't much older than me, and he wasn't running 3 miles when it happened, either.  You read about this kind of crap all the time in the Marine Corps.  Some  42-year-old dude who is the picture of health all of a sudden drops dead, usually while running.  I really didn't want to be one of those guys.  But I still had another mile left to run for the PFT.  If I stopped right then, I would have to redo the whole test from the beginning, and I really hate taking these things.  So I decided to ignore it.  That's how stupid I am.  I think I might be having a heart attack, and my decision was to ignore it.

Well, it wouldn't be ignored.  The pain began to get worse and worse, and seemed to spread across my chest and even up to my neck.  I was gasping for breath.  Now I was becoming very alarmed, but the finish line was now less than a half of a mile away.  So once again, I decided to ignore what I was now absolutely convinced was some sort of cardiac event and just keep running.  Well, jogging at least.  I did slow way down.  Like I said before, I'm an idiot.

So, I crossed the finish line and walked straight over to the Navy Corpsman that was in attendance for the event and told him my symptoms.  I told him I thought we should get into the "safety vehicle" that was staged there and go to see a doctor.  He offered me a small paper cup of water.  I became somewhat more spirited in my request to go see someone who had actually attended medical school.  He suggested that we should wait for the PFT to be over, since he was supposed to be there in case anything happened.  I suggested that he should drive me to the medical clinic before I decided to pull his scrotum over his head.  He found this line of reasoning to be most convincing.  And so we left.

Now upon arriving at the Navy Medical Clinic aboard MCB Quantico, I walked up to the young petty officer at the desk and explained my symptoms.  She was very polite, and entered me into the computer she was sitting at.  Whatever she typed into that thing must have been some sort of code word for "middle-aged man having a heart attack" because they kind of freaked out after that.  They put me into a wheel chair and swooshed me into the back.  There they transferred me to a gurney and started attaching wires all over me.  Suddenly there were about ten people in the room.  Someone was pulling at my shirt, and then the next thing you know, they had cut it off.  Then somebody cut my shoelaces and yanked off my running shoes.  They wheeled in an EKG machine with even more wires and started trying to get an IV started in my arm.  A nurse put two aspirin in my mouth and told me to let them dissolve.  Try that sometime.  It's nasty.  I went from being somewhat concerned to being scared shitless.

The Navy Medical Clinic in Quantico doesn't have any emergency services.  They have to call for an ambulance to take any emergency cases to the hospital in Stafford, a few miles away.  I guess that explains somewhat why everyone was so excited, and maybe why they had such a time with the IV.  The people working on me were all of pretty high rank, so I guess they were the senior doctors in the clinic and didn't do IVs a lot.  They finally gave up after the ambulance crew showed up, but not before stabbing me about 12 times or so in both arms.  Once they released me to them, the fat ambulance guy got one going in about 45 seconds.  The next day both of my arms were covered in bruises.  I'm still a little pissed about that.

This was the first time I had ever been in an ambulance that I can remember (I was in one many years ago, but was passed out.  A story for another time.), and I was now quite thoroughly upset.  The fat ambulance guy asked me about my pain in my arm and chest, asking me if it was the same.  I realized that no, it was getting a little better.  My fingers were still kind of numb, but the aching pain in my shoulder and chest was not as bad.  He told me I was fine and stable, and that it looked like I was fine.  I realized that he was probably right, and started to not feel as scared.  Then I just felt foolish.

We made it to the hospital in just a few minutes, and they wheeled me straight into the emergency room.  I told the doctor that I was feeling better, though my arm still ached quite a bit, and they did a blood test to see if I had had a heart attack.  I had not.  To make this long story a little shorter, I got an MRI on my shoulder, and the diagnosis was that I had torn the labrum in my shoulder during the pull-ups, and it had swelled, putting pressure directly on my brachial nerves, causing the pain and numbness.  Talk about feeling foolish.  I didn't even know I had a labrum.  I thought that was just the ladies...

So anyway, they discharged me from the hospital in Stafford.  They brought me a phone to call someone to pick me up.  Here's the problem.  I couldn't call anybody.  You don't really know anyone's phone number these days.  Your cell phone knows all the numbers.  And my cell phone was rolled up in my spiffy USMC running jacket next to a tree at the PFT starting line.  I went from feeling foolish to realizing that I was a freaking idiot.  I had to look up the base operator and get the number to the Command and Staff College, which meant I had to talk directly to the second-in-command at the college, a full colonel, to arrange my ride back from my little freak out.  Got into a little trouble from my girlfriend too, when she realized I couldn't remember her phone number.

So that's how I came to be sitting outside the hospital in Stafford, Virginia, waiting for a ride from one of my classmates, in only my green PT shorts with no laces in my shoes.  Not my finest hour.

What's the moral to the story?  I'm not sure...  Maybe it's to memorize your emergency phone numbers.  Maybe it's a precautionary tale about getting older and not being too tough to get checked out.  Maybe it's that you should ignore all of that heart attack nonsense, because it's probably just your labia, you big pussy.