Deleriously…happy?
I didn’t go to work on Monday…
I also had the most frightening medical experience of my life.
Rest assured, I’m fine – The only thing actually wrong with me is a nasty head cold.
It only looked like my life was flashing before my eyes.
Monday morning I woke up from as deep of a sleep as you can manage when your nose is completely blocked and you’re draining down your throat.
When I say “woke up” I mean “Sabrina indicated in as nice a way as possible that I needed to roll out of bed now or I’d be eating cold eggs and be late for work”.
Everything went as normal, breakfast then upstairs to shower, shower went fine – though definitely warmer water than usual.
Towards the end of the shower I bent over to put down the shampoo bottle and stood back up, quickly, and the shower swam around me.
You know that sensation you get sometimes when you stand up too quickly?
yeah. That one. No big deal, right? Everything snaps back into focus pretty fast, everything’s good.
This time, things didn’t come back. My head kept spinning, and I kept thinking “okay, focus, focus, just…going to…lie..dow-THUMP”
Through the fog I hear Sabrina – though not from the beginning – she came running into the bathroom and shouting my name, trying to get through to me. I was responsive enough to stand up, but only long enough to wobble a bit and lay down in the tub again. I remember being down on my knees with my head on the floor, half in and half out of the tub – I don’t remember ripping the towel bar out of the wall with my head. She managed to get me upright and sitting, at which point I managed to focus on the holes in the wall and mumble out a semi-coherent apology, and after that the only words I could string together were “I’m fine”. She tells me that I passed out again shortly thereafter, and when I came to the last time everything shifted and came back into focus, and I was fully coherent once again.
The entire experience was, in fact, remarkably like being drunk. I’ve never been drunk enough to pass out, or even drunk enough to not be able to stand and walk, but the portions of the experience which I remember with any clarity are strikingly similar.
Sabrina was terrified. I feel very guilty for scaring her that badly – though I had no idea what was happening at the time. I remember being frustrated at my inability to reassure her.
Apparently what had happened was fluid in my sinuses pressing on my middle ear, combined with the sudden rush of standing up in a hot, steamy shower all came together to completely overwhelm my sense of balance and consciousness. The doctor says I look completely healthy apart from my cold – and I know this one’s a doozy. Sabrina herself nearly lost it a few days earlier, without even being in the shower. I suspect she’d have had a similar problem if the dizziness had happened somewhere like that.
I can tell you, though…I definitely got a good scare out of it. I hate being sick.
