Nightmare On Vasovagal Street
For my regular subscribers, I know I owe you multiple Last Things First transcripts from October, so please prepare for a deluge…should I not send all of them to your emails at once? Do tell! I’ve also mulled over several topics in the past two months and scrapped them midway through essay research and/or writing, so how did this one make the cut? Read on!
I scare easily. But not as easily as I can scare others, apparently.
Which might surprise more than a few of you, as I don’t cut the most intimidating figure for friends or strangers. Anyone who has seen me in person can attest to my non-threatening vibe. I’m the kind of guy babies and puppies run toward. Not the kind women run from, and even if they hadn’t already told me that to my face in the middle of the night on a dark Brooklyn street, I would’ve known this much to be true. I’m the kind of approachable where strangers will ask me for directions when I’m also in a foreign country.
So what kind of scary am I, exactly?
The Nightmare On Vasovagal Syncope Street kind.
Vasovagal syncope is a hifalutin term for fainting, because it’s a hifalutin form of fainting. If only I simply lost consciousness for a few moments once in a blue moon. If only! But no. I’ve got to be extra about the whole thing.
I didn’t even know what was happening to me the first time. I was 23, a cub reporter still at a small daily newspaper in Idaho, learning how to cover a beat for the first time. My beat: Local government. The county commissioners met and conducted business in the morning, while the city council and the planning and zoning commission met at night. Which usually left me with free time in the middle of the afternoon to nose around for news, or failing that, read the wires. In the time before Twitter and the Internet, the wire services did the job and then some. A never-ending stream of stories from around the world, meant for newspaper editors to cull from to fill the rest of the newsprint each day. Sounds like a grand idea for 2022, doesn’t it?! Anyhow. Back to me and my silly scary problems.
There I sat, just passing the time reading the wires, when a story about a supposed rash of “flesh-eating bacteria” cases caught my fancy and threw me and my fancy ass off of my chair and onto the floor. To me, all I felt was a tingling sensation, followed by a dream in which I was living in the music video for Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun.”
1994, am I right?!?
I awoke on my back on the carpet, my shirt ripped open, listening to the police scanner six feet above me as dispatcher sent an ambulance to the newsroom. To me. EMTs arrived, took my pulse, put me on a stretcher and wheeled me out past my visibly-shaken city editor and the rest of my colleagues. At the hospital, they administered EKG and EEG tests, and a doctor instructed me to stay home for a few days while they evaluated the results. My boss thought I’d suffered an epileptic seizure, so they didn’t want me driving around in case I went into another fit while behind the wheel. I didn’t. Because my tests all came back normal. Despite whatever you think about me, my test results always come back normal.
The second time it happened, a few years later, I already was flat on my back in a doctor’s office while undergoing a minor outpatient procedure. That’s when I first heard the words: Vasovagal syncope.
If you can believe it now, back in 1997, the Internet had not yet advanced to the point where I could Google “vasovagal syncope” because Google wasn’t a thing yet, and asking Jeeves or even Yahoo! wouldn’t produce a handy graphic like this one:
Over the next several years, I never knew how to predict an oncoming episode. Forget Jim and Pam on The Office, my own destiny with extra-special unconsciousness was my own “Would I or Wouldn’t I?” exercise in futility, because I never knew what might trigger an episode.
Once I collapsed in the lobby of the police station where I routinely scoured the blotter for my rounds as a newspaper reporter on the cops beat. The trigger then? I’d slammed my finger in the car door after parking in front of the precinct.
The link to having blood drawn didn’t happen until a few years after that, while living in Arizona. Since then it has happened almost every other time, but not enough times to become predictable, when nurses take my blood. I tell them every time just to be sure, and yet whenever I do black out, it always takes them by surprise and then some. At the medical clinic where I temped, all of the nurses freaked out so much the one and only time I pulled a vasovagal move, they did double takes every time I paid them a subsequent visit for years afterward.
One doctor suggested dehydration as the culprit, so I always drink plenty of water beforehand. Not that that helps any.
One time I had to get bloodwork at a neighborhood lab, and convulsed so much in the chair during my blackout that the nurse — the only one working the lab that day — called 911. When paramedics arrived, I couldn’t get up from the floor. They took me to the ER, where I lay in pain for hours. X-rays revealed no broken or bruised ribs. I must’ve tensed up and spasm’d so rigorously that I torqued my diaphragm muscle, which forced me to lay low for months while it slowly healed.
Another time, they took so much blood that when I came to after blacking out and convulsing, I threw up within seconds. That leaves quite an impression on the nurses.
Twice it happened without any apparent triggers. Both times, I feared I might be experiencing a heart attack. My parents felt the secondhand pain and suffering that first time, since I had just arrived at their home for the holidays — an ER visit and 48 hours in the hospital left me weary, but without any evidence of a heart attack. A panic attack, perhaps. Years later, I wondered if said panic attack may have been my first brush with the dangers of self-detoxing from alcohol. Either way, since when do people pass out from panic attacks? Don’t they almost always have to experience every brutal second of them? So when it happened again in 2016, this time completely sober at the beginning of my workday as an office temp, collapsing in front of the front-desk receptionist as I suggested she call for help, I really did feel helpless. But again, 24 hours in the ER and a cardiology referral, complete with stress tests and several days sporting a heart monitor on my chest like I’m either Darth Vader or Iron Man, they said I was still good to go. All systems normal.
And then it happened again last Wednesday, in front of my brand-new doctor a few minutes after they’d taken my blood as part of my annual physical. Yes, brand-new as in she just finished her residency and got assigned to my clinic a month ago, seeing me for the first time new. And yes, I’d warned the nurse. But everything felt fine while she took my blood. I carried on a conversation. Never looked at the needle. No reason to think anything of it. Until that recognizable alarm goes off in my head, with barely a second to utter words to warn anyone else. Then off into dreamland once more. I awoke to multiple doctors and the nurse standing above me, one doctor holding my legs up in the air, all of their skin a ghastly white with eyes and mouth agape, horrified by what I’d done.
My new doc informed me that as I lost consciousness, I seized up, clenching my fists and spasming. Sounds like fun to witness, doesn’t it?
For a long while, at least since I’ve been able to Google my causes and conditions, I’d come to believe or understand that what happens to me feels most like when a computer freezes. When your computer stops working, you might have to Force Quit, then reboot. So I considered my vasovagal syndrome as my way of rebooting, my way of hitting Control-Alt-Delete. I might shut down, but give it a minute or two, and I’ll refresh and be good as new!?
But now I’m finding myself attempting to take a longer, deeper look at my fears and this very-much flight-over-fight response of mine.
Just look at this lady depicted by the folks at Scientific Animations. She looks like she cannot bear to deal with any of it. They’ve replaced bloody needles with such things as stress and loneliness. Not everyone can relate to a fear of blood, but stress and loneliness??? Everyone’s coming down with a case of that since the pandemic, if not since the election of 2016, or even before that for some of you.
I picked the 2016 election because that’s when I finally got sober, and through my own recovery, could see how everyone else’s self-centered fears were manifesting thanks to political propaganda. It’s so clear now if you watch TV right now, inundated with election-eve commercials trying to scare you into voting against whatever they think you might fear the most.
I could’ve just as easily picked 1933, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt said famously “the only thing we have to fear is: fear itself.”
I know that we’ve divided ourselves hopelessly into tribes with their own senses of reality that don’t even try to co-exist with each other. But I know, too, the truism that it often seems darkest before the dawn. I haven’t completely given up hope on us, or upon myself.
Because at least for me, I know the fear can only come from inside my house.