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

[sovay]

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.

Comments

[sovay]

in my case, no tinnitus or continuing vertigo, but including the rest of the grossness beforehand and the not remembering the immediate couple of seconds before I fainted. (Which at least once apparently included my announcing, "I think I'm going to faint," whereas I have no personal memory of even realizing that I was going to faint.)

Bleh. I still find it faintly unnerving that I don't remember even thinking about seltzer, much less going for it. I remember wanting to get into the green basket chair (it may be correctly called a papasan, but I never heard the term until I started hanging out with Rob), but evidently I didn't reach it. I do not like things that interfere with my memory, which is why I hate a certain class of anaesthetics.

Best anyone has been able to figure out it's just One of Those Things, which is unfortunate insofar as if it were the sight of blood or something I could know what to avoid, but is at least better than it being About Something.

What are the circumstances under which it's happened? (I'm not trying to diagnose a cause, I'm just curious.)

Congratulations on successfully beta-testing the marriage, though!

Hee. Thank you!

[fleurdelis28.livejournal.com]

It happened once when I was fourteen and standing at a poolside snackbar about to order something (my mother took me to the doctor, where I threw up and then felt a lot better; he suggested that maybe I had already had something going on with my stomach, and the influx of blood to my gut had diverted it from my brain*). And I fainted at the Rally to Restore Sanity, where I remember feeling gross and telling my brother I was going to try to make my way through the crowd to a nearby tree, and remember giving up on the attempt and heading back, but am missing the couple of seconds in which I apparently both told my brother that I thought I was going to faint, and got close enough back to him that he was able to catch me when I fell. My memory skips from being ten or fifteen feet away to waking up on the grass hearing strangers talking about me. My brother's med-student friend (who had been really worried about what to do if I hadn't woken up so quickly, since there was no phone reception on the Mall) took me to the cafe of one of the nearby museums and got me juice and food, and I felt drained and kind of chagrined but was otherwise fine.

Various guesses about why I fainted that time include dehydration, all the standing, and the fact that I was too short to see a horizon or anything else around me on account of the crowd, but no one really knows - on Yom Kippur I go 25 hours without drinking, walk miles, and then stand for over an hour straight, and have never had this problem, and the Rally was in October, so it wasn't very hot out either (though there was a lot of direct sun, insofar as you can get direct sun in October). My working theory is that I obviously just faint once ever 14 years.

* If that doesn't make sense, I would blame my memory rather than the doctor, since that's just my seventeen-years-old recollection.

[sovay]

If that doesn't make sense, I would blame my memory rather than the doctor, since that's just my seventeen-years-old recollection.

Yeah, I associate feeling better immediately after throwing up with food poisoning, but I am also not a person who throws up unless I have food poisoning, so it's possible it's a soothing action for a whole bunch of other sensations I don't experience. (Also, I don't feel better after throwing up from food poisoning, I just know I don't have a toxic substance in my system anymore. The actual act of vomiting is awful and I consider myself lucky to have experienced it maybe half a dozen times in my life.)

And I fainted at the Rally to Restore Sanity

I vaguely remember this! Being told about it afterward, anyway, when everyone had returned to their respective lands of working internet.

My working theory is that I obviously just faint once ever 14 years.

Well, it's better than having locusts [edit] cicadas.

[edited because most things are better than having locusts, but I was actually thinking of the insects with a fixed schedule]

[fleurdelis28.livejournal.com]

Oddly, people in my family do have a tendency to get really light-headed when they stand up when they're on the thin side, and last time I was really thin it happened to me all the time, but I never fainted because of it and never had it happen on the occasions when I did faint (both of which happened when I had already been standing for a while).

[sovay]

but I never fainted because of it and never had it happen on the occasions when I did faint (both of which happened when I had already been standing for a while).

The doctor asked if I'd been standing with my knees locked, which I very definitely hadn't because I'd been taking a shower and then moving around the bathrobe and the hallway afterward, but I wonder if that was a component with you.

[fleurdelis28.livejournal.com]

It's possible I may have been standing with my knees locked for a while that morning, but they can't have been at the time I fainted because if I hadn't been walking towards my brother I never could have gotten close enough from my point of last memory for him to have caught me. And I definitely felt it coming for some minutes, even if I didn't actually identify it as going-to-faint until so close to the actual fainting that I don't remember having done it. Now if I feel at all like that I go out of my way to sit down, though there's limited evidence of any correlation between my feeling faint and my actually fainting.

(I suppose one could float a brains-are-devious-things theory where fainting was a clever way to get myself space in the midst of the crowd when I was already feeling shut in, but it's much more likely that my feeling shut in was due either to the fact that I was already starting to feel gross, or to the same close-quarters-with-no-horizon that was simultaneously leading me to feel faint. Also, if my brain pulled stunts like that I can think of any number of clogged subway cars that would have made better candidates.)

I can't be sure what my knees were doing when I fainted at the snack bar, though since I think I was leaning casually on a ledge jutting out from the delivery window, they probably wouldn't have been locked.