Get to a certain age and the conversation often shifts to personal health issues. (Sorry ’bout that.)

I am surprised by the number of people who tell me about their stents, for instance. This matter of running a probe from your wrist and up your arm into your heart is surprisingly commonplace. It’s also amazing what relatively small community hospitals are doing nowadays. (OK, ours is now a subsidiary of Mass General Hospital in Boston … like the best. Not that I really considered that at the time I was being wheeled off to God knows what.)

But that leads to other things like learning that my clerk at the hardware store and I have the same cardiologist, or did till said doc moved to Florida. (Well, that has to be a hot market for cardiac work!)

It also brings up others who say that they, too, felt no pain … thought it was a breathing issue rather than a pending heart attack.

Or that their cholesterol levels, like mine, had been normal.

As a factor, I’m convinced stress was a major component in my case. Seventeen years between marriages, with all of the relationship uncertainty, along with working under relentless deadlines as I did at the newspaper must have taken a toll. Besides, I wasn’t getting regular exercise in that period, other than dashing to and from the composing room.

As one buddy said, if you lined up a hundred guys our age, he would have been the first to be tagged for this problem and I would have been the last.

Well, he’s had a few health issues, but cardio hasn’t been one of them.

For you younger readers, take warning.

Cheers! And good luck …