How to avoid fainting

Factual Questions
1

I have a call in to my physician about this, but I was wondering if dopers had any home remedies to avoid fainting or feeling faint. I think I may have made it worse by myself in an attempt to feel better. Here’s the scoop…

I’m on three different medications. I take:

Buspar twice a day
Vistaril twice a day
Doxepin for sleep if needed (took one last night)

The doctor has already cut my dose of vistaril in half when I complained that I was having fainting spells. It seemed to get better yesterday, but today I’m back to being basically unable to get out of a chair. I get that “blood pressure drop” effect where my vision slowly goes black, my ears ring, my head feels like it’s floating away. It’s BAD this morning. By that I mean that I feel rather “disabled.” Getting up the stairs to the bathroom feels like a danger.

Knowing that fainting can be caused by low blood pressure and low blood sugar (I eat a VERY low-sugar diet normally) I’ve tried adding both salt and sugar to my diet. I’m eating M & Ms right now in desperation. I also made the desperate and probably unfortunate move of trying to perk myself up this morning with caffeine and even with a cigarette. Of course, I feel like the cigarette made it much worse…there’s nothing that’s made better by nicotine I was just thinking that a stimulant might help.

So…while I wait for the cig affects to wear off and for the doctor to call and suck on M & Ms, does anyone know any other home remedies that might help? I took a vitamin with a glass of V8 (more desperation). How do I go about my business with this going on?

I have a feeling I’m going to have to switch meds, which is unfortunate because in spite of side effects the combo is working well for me. Yeah, I know the doc is the best person to ask, but is there something I can do to ease this up while I’m waiting?

2

IANAD, and your best bet is to just wait for your doctor’s advice. However, one bit of non-medical-expert common sense advice is that if you are standing up and feel faint, sit down! A common remedy for feeling faint is to sit and put your head between your knees to bring better blood flow to your brain. It is better to sit (or lie) down on the floor than to fall like a tree and give yourself a concussion, for example.

3

Some symptoms of depression medication do lessen in time. The best way to deal with it is experiement with the dosage level and see what exactly is causing it. Is it the meds. If so is it any ONE med or is it a combination of them? Is it different when you take them with food? Sometimes it takes a while to get it right. And unfortunately some meds side effects are just too unpleasent to live with.
I suffer from Meniere’s Disease (a balance disorder caused by the ears) and it is very scary to feel faint, but you do learn to cope with it.

As long as your fainting isn’t dangerous, you can learn to lessen the symptoms, like rising slowy etc