At 5 a.m. I was awoken by what I thought was a muscle spasm. I had done some kettle bell swings the day before and thought: Oh Christ, new middle age pains. But, quickly it became obvious it was not a muscle ache. The pain began to radiate more and more bizarrely, more diffusely, coming out of some lower-back left-hand quadrant of my body. I broke out into a cold sweat. I’ve never broken out into a cold sweat. I thought I was going to throw up. I commando-crawl-rolled (I couldn’t stand, so intense was the pain), phone in hand, into the bathroom. On the cool tile of the floor, curled up around the toilet I furiously … chatted with ChatGPT. It was five in the morning and I wasn’t going to wake someone up; and I wasn’t going to call an ambulance just yet. Sure it felt like an emergency, but I wasn’t yet convinced. Weird pains come with a huge dollop of denial in the beginning. No, no, this can’t be something that might actually kill me.

[…] I tried not vomit all over the floor, the cold-sweats died down, and the pain subsided, and I was able to crawl back to bed. Whatever had just happened had wiped me out, and I fell back asleep almost instantly, thinking — just as I winked out of consciousness — that it would be nice to not die alone in this fancy hotel room.