I have a psychological disorder called stress-induced anxiety. It’s actually pretty common, inflicting about 40% of the population. Most people have minor symptoms, like an upset stomach before going on stage in front of lots of people (butterflies in your stomach). While others have symptoms so severe that they will avoid situations altogether, like white coat syndrome, where people will actively avoid getting medical care due to a fear of doctors. I’m not that extreme. I won’t avoid getting medical care, but something about the experience definitely sets me off.
What happens is that I get so worked up that eventually my blood pressure drops suddenly and extensively, causing me to black out for a minute. It’s like my body senses an issue and shuts down to analyze the problem and reboot the system. To me it feels like a black mist enveloping me, and when it completely covers my face, I’m gone. I usually wake to someone shaking or slapping me, and it feels like I’m being pulled out of a deep, refreshing sleep. I know that I’m dreaming, but due to the violent nature that I’m awoken, I can never remember about what. Most times, it’s just embarrassing, but occasionally, like on this day, I sustain injuries as well.
And I can’t tell you a pattern as to when it might happen, because it doesn’t happen every time I go to the doctor. It also doesn’t happen at the sight of blood, as many people erroneously seem to think. It doesn’t even solely happen at a normal doctor. I had an episode at the optometrist once when he dilated my pupils. In fact, it also has an empathetic nature, where I can be triggered by someone else’s pain. The other unusual incidents are when nothing physically is happening at all. Someone can just be describing a medical procedure or something they had done to them, and I’ll feel the “change” starting to happen.
Which is sort of what happened today. After examining my hand, the PA was telling me what he thought it could likely be, and I blacked out. The bad part was that I was sitting on an examine table at the time, leaning forward. I apparently fell right into the surprised PA’s arms. Thank God that it was a man who was sort of strong enough to catch my weight and lower me to the floor. I say “sort of” because I sustained injuries before or as he caught me.
You see, they had pulled out the footrest on the examine table for my feet. So, as I fell, my legs slammed into the footrest, catching the corners on my knees and then raking down my shins as I slid off. It wasn’t until I was leaving that I realized the extreme pain that this incident caused. And that was because I was a little distracted by the after effects of blacking out.
I woke up laying on the floor, surrounded by four extra people that hadn’t been there before. At first I was confused, but then I had a sinking feeling that I’d gone through “the change.” It’s funny, because to me it reminds me of one of those werewolf movies, where the guy wakes up in the woods, covered in blood and no idea how he got there. Then, he realizes that he must have transformed again. So, there I am laying on the floor, calmly realizing that I must have blacked out, confirmed by a different PA telling me that I just blacked out, trying to regain focus on reality. And this is when the series of stupid things starts to happen.
The first stupid thing was when the second PA, we shall call him “the moron” from here on out, suggested that they lift me up into the chair instead of leaving me on the floor. I was already dizzy and my stomach was churning, so the sudden motion of putting me into a chair exacerbated the situation. The second stupid thing was the fact that the moron kept telling me over and over again that I had passed out and drilling me with questions about my past history with this, and what I’d eaten that morning, etc. instead giving me a few minutes to recover first. The third stupid thing was when I told them that I needed to lie down, and the moron said that he didn’t want to move me yet. So, I had another anxiety attack and blacked out again.
This time they were able to catch me and keep me in the chair. I guess the moron felt like I’d be better laying on the examine table than sitting in a chair (ya think?!), so he and the first PA, we shall call him “chicken little” from here on out, helped me to the table. And that is when the fourth stupid thing happened. Chicken little told me that I looked like I was having a seizure when I had blacked out the first time. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I can almost guarantee that nobody looks graceful unconsciously falling off a table. I’m sure that my uncontrolled everything where probably doing whatever they felt like doing in the dance with gravity. But when I told him that I didn’t have seizures, and that I’d never had a seizure in my life, the moron, who wasn’t even present at the time, started insisting that I had. He didn’t want me to drive home because I could have another seizure on the road. So, he wanted to call an ambulance to take me to the hospital. While trying to convince him that I wasn’t having seizures, I blacked out again.
So, you see, they kept inducing my blackouts by continuing to rile me up and stress me out instead of calming down the situation and resetting things. After the third blackout, they called 911. The fire department EMTs showed up a few minutes later, and now there were eight people in the room. So, for someone that doesn’t like performing in front of an audience, I was suddenly on stage for one! But to their credit, these guys actually seemed more capable than the moron and chicken little.
One of them checked my blood pressure while another checked my glucose levels. A third guy calmly talked me through things, placing a reassuring hand on my shoulder and asking how I was feeling (something that nobody else had thought to do). Only after he’d successfully calmed me down and gotten me a bottle of water did he start asking me questions. And that’s when chicken little started in with the seizure comments again (I swear this guy must have been doing medical research on seizures or something). The EMT asked if I had a history of seizures, to which I replied “No,” and he was satisfied that it wasn’t a seizure. Chicken little got so disgusted with this that he promptly left the room.
And that’s when the first intelligent thing happened. The EMT asked me if I had white coat syndrome. When I affirmed this, which I had told the moron and chicken little THREE times but they ignored it in lieu of seizures, he knowingly started asking me if I had a history of this. I told him that I did, but hadn’t had an incident in five years, and he concluded that I was having a severe anxiety attack. My other vitals were fine, so he told me that it was up to me to choose to go to the hospital or not. So, I chose to go home. The moron got so disgusted with this that he promptly left the room.
I profusely thanked each and every one of the EMTs for coming all this way to check on me, and they left. Alone at last, I lay on the bed drinking my water before calling my wife to recount this bizarre incident. It was at this point that I realized that my knee was throbbing. I looked down to see blood coagulating on my shin. But after the stupidity I had seen on display today, I didn’t want them providing me with any other “care.” So, I limped to my car to go home to ice my knee. It was the first time I’d ever gone to a doctor and came out more injured than when I went in. And I had a $75 copay on top of that, so it was the gift that kept on giving!
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