Lol, yeah. I realized something was wrong when my resting heart rate was in the low 50s, but the cardiologist I talked to wasn't too concerned about it being an emergency, so just scheduled an echocardiogram and a treadmill test. When I went into the hospital for that, I was at 34bpm, but the echocardiogram technician kept a straight face and said, "all I do is take the pictures". When I went to the next room for the treadmill test, I gave the nurse practitioner a warning that I would most certainly black out after 20 seconds. She hooked me up to a 12-lead ECG, looked at the waveforms, then stepped out of the room nervously. She came back and said they were sending me to the ER on a stretcher! Being capable of walking, I negotiated down to a wheelchair. While I waited in the triage area with a portable ECG monitor on my lap, as various paramedics came in and out they glanced down at the display, got excited in disbelief about how I was upright and smiling rather than unconscious, then asked if they could glance through my chart for the learning experience.

21 bpm was measured while I was bundled up like a burrito in a microwave for a cardiac MRI. The machine has to synchronize to your pulse to only collect data between beats. Since my rate was so low, each scan pass took about 4x longer than usual, while having to hold my breath. That was a very long hour of my life.

For a while it was a bit of a Dr. House episode, between the root cause being unknown, and the pacemaker having a reliability issue that needed debugging. I estimate about a dozen cardiologists poked and prodded me. They even had a "conference" with something like 30 people, and it being a teaching hospital, they also did a case study.

I'm doing a lot better now, thanks to smart doctors and the marvels of modern medical technology.