I’m like a fainting goat, but not

Apparently I have a tendency to faint with seizure-like symptoms. I have to say “apparently” because I keep missing it every time I faint. Now I always carry a camera with me, so next time I feel faint-y, I’ll whip out the camera and tell the closest person “I’m going to faint. Record it so I can see later.”

On second thought, maybe I won’t do that.

The first time I fainted in a way that got other people all freaked out (because who knows? Maybe I fainted before then but I was by myself and no one noticed) was in my senior year of high school. I was in Anatomy class, which might make some of you say “But Marina, it totally makes sense that you fainted there. Anatomy is gross” but that means some of you are wrong. We weren’t talking about eyes or teeth (the two anatomical things that gross me out), we were talking about wound healing and I wasn’t tired or hungry or anything, so there’s no reason I should have fainted.

But I started to feel really terrible (it got too cold and quiet and I was tired and lightheaded and my stomach hurt and I thought, Oh god, am I hypoglycemic? Why is this happening to me?) and it didn’t go away after I had reached my seven-second threshold for unpleasantness, so as the class period started to wind down I turned to my faithful friends, Red and Casper. (All names have been changed because I might embarrass my friends.)

Me: I don’t feel very well.

Red and Casper: *continue about their business*

Me: (more urgently) Like, I really don’t feel very well.

Red and Casper: *no response*

Me: Um, can you guys take me to the nurse?

Red: (suddenly concerned) Yeah, okay.

I don’t blame Red and Casper for what happened next. When I said “Can you guys take me to the nurse?”, they interpreted it to mean “I think I need a bandaid or something and I need to go to the nurse, but I don’t want to go alone so can you just drop me off there after class?” Being completely fair, that’s a totally normal request, especially considering that Casper and I get separation anxiety if someone doesn’t come with us when we go to the lunch line to buy food.

But when I said “Can you guys take me to the nurse?”, what I actually meant was, “Something is wrong with me so bad that I don’t think I can get to the nurse on my own, and I really need you guys to make sure I get there before I throw up or have a stroke or something.”

Fact.

Instead of sticking it out and just waiting for class to end before I went to the nurse, I decided to take matters into my own hands. And by this I mean, I decided it would be a good idea to lie down on a table.

(It has been pointed out to me that this was actually a better idea than standing/sitting up because lying down by definition gives better blood flow to your head. You guys, I don’t care that it was a brilliant survival idea that instinctive!Me decided to take. I still lay down on one of the long Anatomy classroom tables like I was ready for dissection. Not one of my best moments.)

Red and Casper got really alarmed now because I was lying down on a table with my eyes closed and apparently shaking. Since they’re totally awesome once they realize that there’s an actual urgent medical anomaly happening, Red went to get the teacher (for the purposes of this story I shall call him Mr. Unicorn) and Casper stayed with me so that we could have the following conversation:

Me: *gets up* What happened?

Casper: I think you just had a seizure.

Me: *still leaning weakly on the table* Seriously?

Casper: Yeah.

Then Red and Mr. Unicorn came over and I took a step toward them and then like a pansy I fainted again. Except Mr. Unicorn caught me this time because he has a summer job as a ninja and is totally prepared for what happens when students faint and start seizing without any warning.

The next thing I remember is opening my eyes on the totally unsanitary floor of the anatomy classroom looking up at Mr. Unicorn. He was all like “hey” and I was like “hi” and without even being asked he told me “you just had a seizure” and I was a little more unconcerned by this than I should have been.

Me: Were my eyes open?

Mr. Unicorn: What?

Me: When I had the seizure, were my eyes open?

Mr. Unicorn: Oh. Um. No.

Me: Oh. Then I wasn’t hypoglycemic.

(I’d read somewhere that if you have a hypoglycemic seizure, your eyes are open during it. Apparently this is not true, but since I had just probably had a seizure, I wasn’t really entirely savvy on trivia.)

Everyone apparently took my ability to correctly use “hypoglycemic” in a sentence as a sign that I probably wasn’t too brain-damaged or something, so they gave me a cookie and called the nurse. I don’t know what the hell kind of important emergency she was dealing with that was more important than Seizure!Girl right then, but in the time it took her to get there I could’ve had like twenty more seizures. The only good reason I can think of for her being so late is that one of the sophomores had turned into a zombie and she was helping control the outbreak before it took over the school. But it could just be because our school nurse had the nursing capabilities of a pack of gummy bears and the speed of a dial-up connection.

Still, when she showed up I got to ride to the nurse in a fun little wheelchair. But she didn’t even let me push the wheels myself. This was a major disappointment, but probably for the best because I would have just taken a spin around the school in the nifty little wheelchair and then she would’ve had to chase me.

Wait. Damn. That would have been awesome.

Then we got to the nurses office and she called my mom in the worst way possible.

“Hi, this is the high school. Your daughter just had a seizure.”

What the hell? Way to soften the blow. You don’t even know if I actually had a seizure yet. Are you a doctor? Probably not, a doctor would have let me drive my own wheelchair [citation needed]. But I guess it was effective because my mom and her coworker showed up.

Having a seizure in school makes you really important apparently, because the principal and my guidance counselor both showed up to check on me. Then I got to take my first ever ambulance ride. It was really cool because I wasn’t too sick or anything, so I kept looking around and texting my friends and annoying the EMT.

Me: What’s that?

EMT: It measures your heart rate. Do you have epilepsy?

Me: Why am I not wearing it right now?

EMT: You don’t need it. Do you have epilepsy?

Me: No. What’s in that drawer?

EMT: Have you ever had a seizure before?

Me: What’s in that drawer?

EMT: Tongue depressors.

Me: Ohh.

When we got to the Emergency Room they ran some tests, but the only one I really remember was the EKG. Doctors go for patients all the time [source: Grey’s Anatomy] so I figured I might as well try.

Cute Male Intern: So then I just have to put these suction cup things on your chest. Um, or we could get a female to do it if you’re more comfortable with that.

Me: No. You can do it.

Then we sat in the ER for a while and they eventually said “Well, we don’t know what’s wrong with you. Go home.” And that’s what the EEG people said a week later so I figured that the universe decided it would be totally chill if I was randomly narcoleptic and then danced the Cotteneye Joe in my sleep.

Fast forward a couple months. My mom and I went to California for the annual TLC conference even though she had meningitis at the time (story for another day) and got kinda sick on the way there and the way back. I was totally cool on the way there, but at about 3:12 AM on the redeye back I started to feel kinda bad, which quickly turned into “oh my God why is this happening again?!” I was a lot calmer about it this time and didn’t even ask for an escort, I just crawled out of my window seat and trotted to the flight attendants at the back of the plane.

Me: Hi. I don’t feel very well.

Stewardess: (much more concerned than Red and Casper initially were) Do you feel like you’re going to faint, or throw up?

I really liked that she gave me those options. She did it with the same courtesy that she offered me “Chicken platter or fish sandwich?” (The answer is chicken platter, obviously. Otherwise my whole area of the plane would smell like a fish market and that is totally not okay.)

Anyway, I told her I thought I was “probably gonna faint” and then all of a sudden I was attacked by a swarm of flight attendants who helped me sit down. I thought this was kind of unnecessary until I remembered that last time I fainted I freakin’ lay down on a table because I didn’t think sitting would work. So I let them sit me down and told them that I need apple juice and not orange juice because oranges are nasty and that hell yes I want an oxygen mask because the last time I was offered an oxygen mask I didn’t take it and it was a mistake.

Then I apparently fainted and started shaking again so they decided they should find whoever I was travelling with and eventually they did find my mom and they were all, “Is that your daughter who just went back there?” and she said “Yes” and they said “She just fainted and I think she’s having a seizure” and because my mom is super maternal and (after one time) got used to this sort of fainting thing she said “Ugh. Okay, hang on, I’m coming.”

So I got some juice and pure oxygen and the plane landed and then we went home. It’s kind of a joke now that I faint all the time like goat with a nervous disorder, but not everyone thinks so. When we told my nurse cousin about all this she gave my mom a really serious look and said “Cioci, if this happens again you should take her to get a CT scan.”

Apparently fainting goats aren’t funny to everyone.