It's not blood, it's a metaphor for love

For our first night as a married couple, derspatchel and I went to a hotel. We are not having a honeymoon in the formal sense, although we are planning some trips in the upcoming year, but we wanted something a little offset from the everyday of our half-unpacked apartment and dishes in the sink and it was the correct decision. We met his mother in the afternoon and took her to see the glass flowers at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. We went home afterward and ate dinner quietly, by ourselves. We were looking forward to sleep.

For our second night, we went to the ER.

It is good to know I have married the sort of person who will literally catch me when I fall, but I could have done without the intense nausea, dizziness, tinnitus, and whiteout that preceded me fainting for the first time in my life that I can remember. I don't even remember reaching for the seltzer, which is what Rob tells me I was doing when I dropped. I just remember his voice sounding suddenly anxious ("Sonya? Hon? Hon, stay with me!") and the disoriented realization that intead of being on my feet near the green basket chair, however sickly, I was on the floor in front of it, supported against him. Then I fell over sideways and shivered a lot. He put a pillow under my head and his bathrobe on top of me for a blanket. We called urgent care. The woman on the other end of the line said something about in sickness and in health and I protested distinctly, we didn't even promise that! It took me much longer than usual to get dressed; the ringing in my ears was deafening and metallic and something was wrong with my inner ear, so that I felt whirling and out of phase with my own body every time I bent or stood or turned my head. It was in fact fairly frightening, because I had no idea what was causing it. I wondered if it was an ear infection. We'd ruled out food poisoning after I didn't throw up. My mother drove us to Mount Auburn, where I was promptly injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected, and selected plugged into a heart monitor, an oxygen monitor, and an IV drip, given an EKG and depleted of several vials of blood, and then ignored for the next three hours. I was freezing and they piled heated blankets on me. The light sensitivity and the acute dizziness faded as the boredom and annoyance came in. Rob read a history of Marvel Comics and I did not sleep because the blood-pressure cuff set off an alarm every time it checked me, which was apparently not diagnostic of anything.

The eventual diagnosis was "vasovagal syncope," which turns out to mean "you felt lousy and you fainted." I hadn't experienced a seizure; I hadn't hit my head when I fell; I had been unresponsive for several moments after passing out, but all my neurological reflexes checked out fine at the hospital—I remembered asking Rob during the slow, light-painful, stumbling-into-things dressing phase if I was making sense when I spoke and he answered unhesitatingly yes. I would have trusted him to tell me if I was not. They sent us home around eight-thirty in the morning on a day when neither of us could stay in bed later than noon; I took a shower to wash off the last traces of EKG glue that the little acetone packets they lend you if you don't have nail polish remover at home had been unable to remove and we both went to bed.

I am now awake; as a state of being, it is totally overrated. But I am not dizzy, not nauseated, not falling into things, and incidentally enjoying being married. A lot. So that's cool. I have to thank like the entire internet tonight.

In other news, my flash "Anonymity" has been accepted by Mythic Delirium. The piece was originally set to appear in Fantastique Unfettered's Shakespeare Unfettered special issue, but it was left homeless when FU folded in October; I am very pleased that time_shark decided to pick it up, because I had no idea where on earth it would fit again. It's Shakespeare and Marlowe on the internet, snarking about the authorship controversy. I should have trusted the weirdness of a man who wears the Goblin Queens' hat.

So, life.