I get it from my momma — a flight response when faced with certain things, usually medical, often at an unideal time. I start to feel woozy, dizzy; it’s hard to concentrate on the person speaking. My anxious imagination starts spinning, thinking I am in danger alongside the other person. My heart rate and blood pressure drop; my body gets coated in a cold, slick sweat; and I’m told I get as white as a sheet, with absolutely no color in my face. I’m usually sitting when this happens, or I get myself to a place where I can sit and let it pass over me, so that I don’t flat out faint. Put my head between my knees. Breathe until I’m, somewhat shakily, returning to that state where my blood pressure is normal and I have some color back.
I grew up hearing the story about my mom picking up my dad at the dentist when she was pregnant. Sitting in the patient’s chair, he turned to her with the gauze in his mouth and said something unintelligible, and the next thing she knew, she had woken up in the chair.
While I’ve never blacked out like that, I’ve experienced this nearly fainting misery a handful of times.
When I thought it was so cool to watch how the nurses took my blood as a young teen, then realized no matter how cool I thought it was, my body didn’t agree with my brain. They kept me seated for a while and gave me a lollipop.
When I got my ears pierced the first time at Claire’s on Broadway at age 13. I sat cross legged in the window while my sweat washed over me.
When I was getting a biopsy of a freckle on my foot at the dermatologist, and accidentally watched, which is when I learned that alcohol pads can help.
When Greg fainted in a tiny bar in Madrid with me and Reeta after eating croquetas because I stupidly didn’t know they were made with bechamel, and he is celiac. He stood up rigidly and fell back like a log, and someone shouted that he was having a seizure. I told the bartender to call an ambulance and Reeta to go back to the apartment to find his passport, and once the EMTs had arrived, my body finally reacted and I told them, “I think maybe it’s something we both ate.” It wasn’t.
When I fell off a scooter four and a half years ago the summer I moved to Miami, sprained my ankle and scraped up my elbow and hip badly. I took one look at my elbow, thought I saw bone, and proceeded to melt. I never went to urgent care and didn’t treat the wound correctly (hydrogen peroxide is not meant to be applied more than once), and now I still have a scar that looks like a bruise.
When last summer, at the Globe Theatre, P and I went to see the The Merry Wives of Windsor for ten pounds, standing in the Yard on a hot as all hell day, shifting from foot to foot, looking up at the actors in their costumes. Then, out of nowhere, smack. A teenaged boy who had been standing just in front of us fainted backwards and hit his head on the pavement. All the emergency workers rushed toward him and carried him out and the actors kept acting because “the show must go on.” I told P, “I can’t be here anymore,” and we sat down on some picnic benches outside while I drank water, and then we left.
So I shouldn’t have been surprised when it happened yesterday, after P had gotten his wisdom teeth extracted, and I came into the room to find him still hooked up, coming to from the general anesthesia, cracking jokes like always. The nurse, Karyni, was giving me all the instructions when I started to feel myself go.
“Do you have an alcohol pad that I can sniff?” I asked.
“Why, do you feel dizzy?” she said, her attention now shifting fully to me.
“I’m gonna be okay I think,” I replied, knowing full well that I wouldn’t be.
“You’re white as a sheet, let’s get you to another room,” she decided, and grabbed me by the arm to go monitor me in a separate room from P. She put the chair flat and tilted it back so blood could rush back to my head, stuck a blood pressure cuff on me, and a pulse monitor, and we talked for the next 20 minutes as she held the alcohol pad in front of my nose and I slowly recovered.
“Don’t feel guilty,” she told me, because she knew I did. “It just means you care. Do you have someone who can pick you guys up?” I knew I had another emergency contact who could help in this moment: Ana. Her husband, Tim, was not too far away, he’d come get us. Tim literally to the rescue.
When I was feeling better, the chair almost upright, they wheeled Patrick in.
“What happened?” He asked, still slurring a bit. “Am I gonna have to take care of you now?”
The nurse offered to take a picture of us. “Go on then,” he said, “it’ll be funny.”
Later, in texts to his family, he wrote alongside the photo, “She properly tried to upstage me.”
I called my mom later when I went back to pick up the car: “Will this ever get better?” I asked. She told me it has only just started to for her.
Luckily, once it passes, it passes. I should probably keep some candies or smelling salts in my purse at all times though, just in case.
Happy to report both patients were doing much better by the afternoon.
Writing With Abandon 