When I was about 11 years old, my best friend and I were playing during recess at school, and I was carrying him around on my back, presumably pretending to be a multipart attack robot. All of a sudden, my heart seemingly started hurting, and I collapsed to my knees, and the robot was no more. Every time I inhaled, it would feel like a spike was being driven into my heart, and my breathing got completely shallow. I was sure I was done for, when all of a sudden, after an exhale, it disappeared.
All of this lasted maybe a minute, so no one but my friend noticed, and to him I just said "I guess I have a bad heart". Needless to say I never spoke to anyone else about, being 11 and all.
This kept happening, a few times a year certainly, and each time I thought I might not make it. And I continued to believe I had a bad heart, destined to an early grave...
I'm being dramatic, but I did feel that way a few times when it happened.
It wasn't until I was in my twenties that I learned this was called Precordial catch syndrome. I felt silly, and also relieved.
I shared this fact with a few friends, and surprisingly, they also expereinced it, and some of them thought they were dying when it did. So for a long time, I've been fascinated with simillar things that are common to all/many humans, but perhaps aren't known. I kept a list thata grew over the years, but the other day decided that AI should be able to expand the list for me by quite a bit.
And so another little project was built: Bodily Oddities, a collection of over 100 such things for now. I'm hoping to add some illustrations and refine the content a bit more. Hopefully someone reads this and is put at ease about a quirk of their body.