Suburbs of Our Discontent

Or, the brief tragick tale of a worrying wife and her perilous googling, whereby she became convinced that her husband was having a heart attack and was going to leave her sore alone to shovel snow and raise the children as she watched her life waste away in her unsellable house.

I have this teensy problem where I leap to the worst case scenario. Especially when it comes to the health of my loved ones. My husband's just taken to hiding his moles from me and lying about his blood pressure numbers (okay, I don't know about that last one for sure, but I'm just guessing).

So when he woke up with crippling stomach pains on Sunday, I calmly assessed the situation and then came to the only logical conclusion possible: he was having a heart attack.

I kept my diagnosis to myself for the time being since I knew I'd need some proof before telling him it was time to go to the hospital for his double, maybe triple bypass surgery. So I did what any discriminating researcher/caring wife would do and googled "stomach pain" and "heart attack." And sure enough, there it was.

So I calmly moved on to another advanced search: "best emergency rooms" and "Boston"; followed quickly by "emergency rooms" and "Boston" and "reviews." (I admit, I have consumer trust issues.) Let me tell you, there are a lot of people out there who like to go to emergency rooms and then dump their buckets o' anger into cyberspace. As I read and read, going deep down the search engine rabbit hole, it became clear that no emergency room in Boston was safe, clean or friendly. Plus there was a good chance I'd wind up sitting next to one of these Yelp-happy ER addicts complaining about the crappy vending machines.

After 30 minutes or so, I decided my husband probably just needed some toast. And maybe a baby aspirin if I could hide it in his coffee.

Just to be safe.