I knew a guy who was riding his motorcycle and trying to reach a gas station so he could take a dump (impending diarrhea). He struggled to retain his diarrhea for a long time, and eventually it triggered vasovagal syncope. He recognized the prodromal phase (i.e. “oh shit, I’m going to black out”), and managed to get the bike stopped by the side of the road. I don’t recall whether he got the sidestand down, but shortly after stopping he blacked out - and completely shat his riding suit.
This happened to my son at our first football practice of the season a couple of years ago. I was running the team through warmups when I see my kid on his back convulsing. That was the most scared I think I have ever been. I swear it took like 5 minutes to cover the 30 yards to get to him. I called his name and it all stopped. He was very disoriented for quite some time and had no recollection of what happened.
Anyway, at least now I know there is a name for what happened.
How are you feeling now, Olive?
What was the process of going from not knowing what was going on and who your husband was to coming back to normal? How did your knowledge and cognitive processes come back?
I had a bout of it about 3 years ago. My husband was out of town with our son. My daughter and I had been watching TV; she went to bed, and I was starting to feel a little queasy. I went upstairs to my room, turned on the TV, started feeling worse, so decided to sit on the toilet to see if I needed to poop or something.
No sooner had I sat down when the room started fading to black and I started swaying. And all I could think of was that my daughter (then 12 or so) knew not to wake me up on weekend mornings, and my husband was going to come home the next afternoon and find me dead or unconscious on the bathroom floor.
Then the room lights came back (i.e. my vision cleared), I broke out into a cold sweat, and I was fine. Just the littlest bit frightening.
Called the doc the next day - ya see, symptoms of syncope sound a lot like the symptoms of a heart attack - and she said she was quite sure it was option A not option B, but had me come in for an EKG.
I feel fine now, just tired. I have the official results from the echocardiogram - negative. So that rules out anything serious. I just worry it will happen again while I’m driving or something. Ugh.
As for what it felt like… Well, after I was walking up the steps, the very next thing I was conscious of was sitting on the steps facing downward with a bunch of people staring at me. I felt that something was very, very wrong with me, but I didn’t know what. I started panicking and said, ‘‘I’m scared, I don’t understand what’s happening,’’ while my husband reassured me. I knew who he was in the sense that I knew he was safe, but I didn’t actually remember who he was in the sense of, ‘‘This is my husband, Sr. Olives.’’ They kept telling me to stay down and I kept trying to stand up because I felt bad that I was holding everybody up. In my head I believed that I’d just sat down for a quick rest and they were overreacting.
A lady sat down on the steps and started talking to me, asking me questions about myself. By talking to her, things started to come back to me. She said she attended a local school that Sr. Olives also attends, and I pointed that out. She told me she did ESL for a living and I told her I had a B.A. in Spanish. It was weird because it was one of those things where I didn’t consciously remember until after I already said it. And for some reason I remembered that I had a BA in Spanish but not that I had an MSW and wrote grants for ESL programs.
So I started getting my identity back pretty much right away, but I was still a little confused about where we were and what was going on. I thought we had come from the opposite direction in the woods. By the time they loaded me into the ambulance, I could answer most questions about myself and my environment but only if I thought really hard about them.
That’s interesting. I’ve had a bout of night terrors over the past year or so, something totally new to me & my hubby, and in researching it we found a recommendation for the spouse to ask a random factual question of the person to bring them back to reality, like “what did you have for breakfast today?”. And it truly worked the one time it’s happened since then! Similar to what that woman did with you. Something about how it makes you switch to a different part of your brain.
I’ve no idea whether that level of confusion is consistent with syncope, but it might be consistent with a “minor” seizure. I saw that you said they did some EEG monitoring, but keep it in the back of your mind anyway.
I have a friend who had some kind of viral encephalitis (she’s vague on the details) years ago that uncovered/ aggravated an existing problem, and the end result is she’s on an antiseizure medication basically forever. A few months ago, she had some major intestinal upset (side effect of an antibiotic), which screwed her system up to the extent that it caused her to become seriously disoriented (as in, didn’t know her husband) for several hours. They’re not sure exactly why, but the theory is that the dehydration may have affected the levels of the medication in her bloodstream.
Anyway - you had just started on your hike so you probably weren’t that dehydrated yet but is it possible your levels of some medication may have gotten a bit wonky?
