I awoke at 6 a.m. Sunday with an excruciating pain in the left side of my torso. It radiated from back to front and worsened as time passed.

I almost had my wife take me to the emergency room for fear of a heart attack, but the pain suddenly stopped after about three minutes. I decided to wait a day and call my cardiologist’s office for an opinion on what to do next. The nurse practitioner, who only a few weeks earlier had given me a thumbs-up at my annual check-up, didn’t seem worried because I didn’t have any shortness of breath or other symptoms, but she scheduled a precautionary nuclear stress test today.

I had a stress test once before, so I was surprised to learn I couldn’t eat anything after midnight the night before. When I got to the office, I learned why — a nuclear stress test is different from the standard treadmill stress test.

The doctor’s aide shot radioactive blood into my veins, which then traveled to my heart so they could get pictures of it. After the first set of pictures, I had to run on the treadmill until I felt like I was going to collapse (it didn’t take long for an out-of-shape, work-at-home journalist). Then I got to eat a snack before one more round of radioactive photography.

That brings me to the Oreos I mentioned in the headline. When I returned to the waiting room to get the aforementioned snack, I was surprised to see snack-sized packages of Oreos as an option.

I woke up Sunday morning thinking I was having a heart attack, and three days later, my cardiologist offered me fat- and sugar-laden cookies as a snack. Tell me how that makes sense.

I ate Cheez-Its instead. They aren’t much healthier, but it just felt wrong to this enlightened redneck to eat Oreos at a heart-checking station.

As for my heart, the aging kicker appears to be in good shape. I’ll have a follow-up appointment with my cardiologist next week, but I was told a doctor would be reviewing my heart snapshots today, and if anything required immediate attention, I would get a call. I never did.