His muscular arms and chest were barely covered by the thin cotton hospital gown. He looked far too robust to be in the hospital, and yet this was his fourth emergency room visit in two months. “I’m losing my strength,” he explained quietly to Dr. Christine Twining, a young physician-in-training. “Doctors keep telling me I’m not having a heart attack. Okay, that’s good, I’m glad it’s not my heart. But can’t anyone tell me what is wrong?”It had started a couple of months earlier, when twenty-seven-year-old David noticed that his hands and fingers felt numb. Then he started having chest pains—a strange tightness or heaviness that made it hard for him to breathe. That’s what sent David to his local emergency room the first couple of times. His mother had recently died of a heart attack and he was afraid he was having one too. Once the ER doctors heard his story, they too thought it was his heart. But at each visit the EKG was normal, the blood tests showed he wasn’t having a heart attack, and the stress test suggested he wasn’t likely to have one anytime soon.
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