It was dark and I was conscious of my brother Hal saying ‘Jim wake up, wake up Jim’. But I didn’t understand what was going on.
Then I heard it again, and this time Hal was slowly fading into sight, he was looking down at me, I figured out that I was lying down and staring up at him. I could see a very bright beautiful blue sky behind him.
‘Jim wake up, Jim wake up!’
Finally I came to my senses. I realized there were others staring down at me. I now understood that I had fainted and people were circling trying to revive me.
One of them was a Doctor. She took over for a bit, getting me to eventually sit up after asking a lot of questions to understand how/if my brain was functioning.
I passed.
Then four firemen appeared and they asked more questions, took my blood pressure, oxygen and heart rate. I was normal. Eventually we all felt more comfortable and decided I should head to the Cochrane Community Health Centre to get cleaned up as I had a good welt on my head, road rash on shoulder and knee and totally removed a considerably large piece of skin off of my forearm.
The Cochrane staff were beyond awesome and made me feel very comfortable with the whole situation. They took blood, did two ECG’s, gave me a bag of saline and cleaned all my wounds.
The explanation for my incident was that I had a vasovagal syncope episode. These typically occur after standing for a prolonged period of time; they can be triggered by fasting, dehydration, being in crowded or excessively warm environments, or following stressful events. Certainly can say I covered off these criteria as we were at a crowded farmers market in high temp. And if I look back at the last three weeks I may inadvertently pushed myself too hard;
Started holiday with 3 weeks of Pancreatitis
4 days in Wiarton Hospital with no food and only clear fluids. Slowly had to reintroduce food so I had lost 14 lbs.
Flying back to YYC the day I got out of the hospital
Endoscopy with fasting
CT scan with IV contrast dye
ERCP with fasting
Lots of walks and two golf games
So ya, while I am surprised I guess I shouldn’t be. But it was so weird when it happened. Hal and I were sitting on a ledge, feet firmly on the ground, and drinking our manly chai lattes having a nice conversation. Then all of a sudden I felt odd. I asked Hal to look at my eyes to see if they were dilated as everything was a bright white and yellow. He said they were fine and the next thing I hear is ‘wake up Jim!’
Not 100% sure what the lesson is. Others may see it as being an obvious case of not taking the time to recuperate or convalesce long enough. And I guess the results speak for themselves.
But.
How do you keep moving forward if you don’t continue to move forward? I need to build strength, I need to keep moving, I need to have purpose to my days and I need to feel human. That’s the big one - feeling human. This disease and all it’s trappings have many ways to demotivate you physically , emotionally and spiritually.
So you keep moving. Two steps forward, one step backwards, with an occasional nose dive to the pavement!
You just keep moving forward. But maybe a bit more cautiously I guess.
