So, a strange thing happened to me last weekend.
I had just emerged from the shower, on Sunday morning, when I felt a bit light headed. I was both excited and nervous about the organisation and execution of my birthday party later that day, so I put it down to adrenaline; and, in fact, maybe adrenaline had something to do with it. In any case, I took a deep breath (of what, in retrospect, and in a poorly ventilated bathroom, was probably mostly steam) and started to shave.
As I dragged my, perhaps fortuitously blunt, razor down my throat, I started to feel further lightheadedness, which quickly became outright nausea. I felt that strange feeling you get in the backs of your teeth and gums that comes when you're about to be sick, and I made the sensible decision to put the razor down. I haven't thrown up for a good thirteen or fourteen years, a record I'm quite proud of, and I tried to resist the churning feeling in my stomach, and the increasingly dizzy feeling in my head, sitting down on the bathroom chair to try and steady myself.
After a few moments seated, the feeling of nausea began to pass, but was replaced by a far more concerning loss of vision - grey splotches, edged with black began to creep into my view, and I closed my eyes to try to get rid of them. When I opened them, they were still there, and I felt my brain start to slip into that state you find yourself in in dreams, where events are clearly happening to you, but you take the role of the narrator - directing and describing the action in the third person. In the dream it feels perfectly natural, of course, and so it did at this point, as I pondered my options very calmly but also very slowly.
I decided, apparently after several seconds of thought, that what a person in this situation should really do is find some fresh air, so I got up from the chair and opened the bathroom door. By this point, I was almost entirely in third person mode, and can remember feeling very disconnected from the environment, and, both mentally and physically, very numb. I can remember getting two or three steps onto the landing, heading for the room at the end of the hall, with a window, and fresh air; all the time my vision worsening, until I couldn't see anything but greyness. I guess somewhere between here and the wall of the room with the window, I blacked out.
My next memory is waking up crumpled against the wall of the room I was trying to get to, with my dad shaking my shoulder and checking I was ok. I couldn't initially explain what had happened, because the memory felt so much like a dream - like I'd watched, or imagined, or made up the previous ninety seconds. I also felt no physical discomfort - the dizziness and nausea were gone, and my vision cleared up quickly. After a sit down and a cup of tea, in fact, I felt shaken, but otherwise physically fine. This seems odd to me, since I must have collapsed or fallen pretty hard - certainly loudly enough for my parents to have heard it from a couple of rooms away - and yet I had no bruising or pain at all. By the evening I had developed a pain in my back and in my left wrist (the side I fell on), though I dont know whether to attribute these symptoms to the fall, or to stresses and strains of the rest of the day. It certainly seems odd to me that I would not feel the pains for another 14 or 15 hours after the event.
As I say, I felt absolutely fine after a mug of hot, sweet tea (the restorative powers of which I had up until that moment never fully appreciated), but two things struck me about the events almost straight away. The first was that I was very lucky - I was lucky that I didn't black out while still in the bathroom, or while holding my razor and I was lucky my parents were home. I have no memory of the seven or eight steps I must have taken along the landing before collapsing, and during that time, I passed the top of the stairs - if I'd gone over them I'd have more than likely done myself a serious injury. I fell a foot away from the edge of the radiator, which could have done some serious damage, on one side, and the edge of a wooden table piled up with boxes and plants on the other, which could also have been very painful to hit. I'm therefore massively thankful that I subconsciously managed to avoid these fates.
The second thing that came to mind was that I gained a sudden empathy for characters in television shows and movies who have been overcome by fumes, or trappped in burning buildings. It sounds silly, perhaps, but in the back of my mind, I've always been slightly dubious of the disabling effects of that kind of situation, and when putting myself in the character's position (as we all do), I generally assumed that I could have got to safety, or done whatever else was required. If, however, the effect of those situations is anything like that which I experienced, I can totally understand anyone's inability to cope. I don't really know how to describe the feeling, but it was dreamlike. Nothing particularly mattered, and every action was dictated and performed with real delay. And the period from me realising something was really wrong to falling unconscious was a maximum of ten seconds or so, and during that period I certainly didn't have full mental or physical capabilities.
In any case, I thought I'd relay that bizarre and slightly distressing moment from last Sunday for your enjoyment, utilizing the internet to its full potential as a communication medium by clogging it with meaningless personal stories.
