Two days before Cheney's procedure, I underwent the same type of electrophysiology study, in which tiny probes are threaded through your veins to map the currents in your heart. It left me physically exhausted and emotionally drained, and I'm a fit 37-year-old male with no history of heart disease.

I'll explain the reason for my trip to the cardiac catheterization lab in a bit, but let me start by describing it.

First came a half-hour or so of prepping. A nurse put an I.V. in. "Beautiful veins," she said, meaning, I gathered, easy to tap. (Does Cheney get such nursely praise?) She then shaved off a lot of my body hair and stuck on perhaps 20 electrical contacts. (I'm still picking at the stickum.) In addition to the familiar doodads for cardiac monitoring, she pasted two big rectangular patches on my chest that take the place of the defibrillator paddles. These would be used to zap me if my heart developed an arrhythmia during the procedure that they couldn't stop any other way.

After I waited about an hour and a half for my team to finish up with someone else (I bet Cheney didn't have to wait), an orderly wheeled me into the cardiac catheterization suite and transferred me to a long, narrow table beneath a giant X-ray machine. There were four big-screen computer monitors hanging above my feet and perhaps a dozen more stationed around the room.

I chatted with the nurse and orderly who were strapping me to the table to confirm that this was the most up-to-date suite in the cardiac catheterization department, representing an investment of a couple of million dollars by NYU Medical Center.

After the nurse told me that she was putting Valium into my I.V., I remember the sensation of something cooler than my own blood passing into the vein in my arm, and then not much else for the next three hours.

The doctors ran catheters through the veins in both my legs and a vein in my neck to my heart. In my case, they were treating a condition called supraventricular tachycardia -- episodes of an irregular and rapid heartbeat caused by an extra electrical pathway in the heart. It's something I was born with. While essentially harmless and unrelated to other heart ailments, I had decided to treat it because the episodes were becoming more frequent.

Once the catheters were in place, the doctors used them to try to induce my arrhythmia. Cheney got the same catheters, inserted the same way. I gather his doctors tried to pace his heart to induce, in a controlled setting, the irregular rhythms they wanted to treat, which in his case are related to his heart disease and the gradual damage it has done to the electrical system in his heart.

To treat my tachycardia, the doctors used radio-frequency radiation to destroy the extra electrical pathway in my heart. To treat Cheney's, as the whole world now knows, doctors put a device in his chest. So our treatments were different. But the biggest share of the work we both had done was when the doctors went in to map the heart.

Though I was never under general anesthesia, the next thing I remember after the Valium twilight was lying in the recovery area, my wife and father-in-law with me and nurses and doctors milling about.

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