au bon pain

I realize that the last entry left off with me complaining of chest pain and then nothing else. Anyway, I did go to a doctor yesterday and it turns out to be nothing more than some kind of muscle pull, which is what I suspected.

A reader from Omaha, NE, writes to share her own story of sternal discomfort:

you know, i was convinced that i had broken a rib in a traffic accident one 

time in viet nam, and had this incredible pain in the left side of my chest. 

  i had 2 doctors (1 australian & 1 vietnamese) tell me that this was not 

the case, but i didn't quite believe them.  it seemed there was clearly 

something wrong.  and then this scientist who was researching how to extract 

bear bile for medicinal purposes in "more humane" ways (versus the appalling 

and then proliferating bear farming trade, which at the time i didn't know 

about) gave me a little bottle of bright green bear bile.  it was one of 

those things where i didn't really want to take it, but it seemed it would 

be rude to refuse.  and i did try rubbing it on the painful area twice a day 

as instructed, and people kept asking me everyday if i felt a lot better, 

which i didn't at all, and no one liked that response.  finally the bottle 

ran out & people stopped asking.  and a few months later the pain went away. 

  i still have the scar on my elbow from the accident.

On my way to the doctor's office last night, incidentally, I stopped at Subway for a diet-consistent VeggieMax sandwich. It was the eeriest thing... when I walked in, it looked like a Subway that had just opened for the very first time and I was its very first customer. Everything was completely stocked and clean, and the produce trays were not only all full but the produce looked so fresh that I actually stuck my head around the sneeze guard to see that it wasn't some trick of the lighting. Maybe they are coloring their vegetables now, I don't know, or using some kind of extra-special-genetically-modified vegetables. I thought for a moment that perhaps the chest pain was worse than I had thought and that I had died and gone to the newest franchise of Subway in heaven.