People who have fainted: what caused it?

[justseyi]

So the weirdest thing happened to me the other day: I sneezed and hiccupped at the exact same time. For a moment, it felt like my body just completely vapor locked. I went down for almost a full minute, like I had literally rebooted, and when I stood back up, I was fine. It honestly felt like my body had just taken a screenshot.

That reminded me of a much scarier time, though. I was once coughing to clear my throat, choking on my own spit, and laughing all at once when I suddenly went out cold—while driving.

My brother told me later that he saw the engine rev up, looked over, and found me limp in the driver’s seat with my eyes open and glassy. The first thing I remembered when I came to was him shouting at me. Somehow, I had drifted into a hardware store parking lot and crashed right into the garage door.

The car ended up perched on top of a skid of pipes. If it hadn’t been during COVID, the door would’ve been open, and I probably would’ve flown through the building into a back wall of pipes. Weirdly enough, timing saved my life. Paramedics came, I went to the hospital, and doctors called it a laryngeal ictus—basically just a freak accident.

They didn’t even suspend my license since I had no history of passing out. Insurance replaced my car, but the hardware store had plywood over that door for almost two years. This was six years ago, and now it’s mostly just a story I tell.

Ever since then, whenever I get a coughing fit, I pull over and put my car in park. Easily the scariest moment of my life—well, that and the time I dodged an arrow so late that the fletchings actually nicked my ear.

It seems like the human body just loves to rage quit sometimes. Once, I had diarrhea and vomiting at the same time, and I swear my brain factory reset.

My wife still laughs about a similar episode from years ago: she came into the bathroom and found me bent over the toilet, liquid shooting out of both ends, and she said I looked like a decorative water fountain from Hell. She laughed so hard she cried. After that year, I never skipped a flu shot again.

Stress does it too. After my husband died, I fainted multiple times in the days following the funeral. Years later, the same thing happened after I buried my son. I had never fainted once before those moments, but grief overwhelmed me in a way my body couldn’t process.

Other times it’s almost comical. In basic training, we had to stand so still that my blood literally pooled in my feet. I blacked out and collapsed backward.

The guys behind me didn’t even try to catch me—they just stepped aside and let my head smack right into a concrete wall. After that, the instructors warned us to wiggle our toes so the same thing wouldn’t happen again.

When I first started college for a medical field, I nearly fainted from a completely different reason: cold and then heat. The classroom was freezing, so I sat in the sun on our first break to warm up. I must’ve overdone it because the moment I stood up, I was dizzy and lightheaded.

I stumbled back inside, and that’s the last thing I remembered before waking up on the floor surrounded by medical students and my professor checking my head. Talk about humbling.

Sometimes it doesn’t even take much. Once I nicked my leg shaving in the shower, and my whole body freaked out. My hearing buzzed like a swarm of bees, my vision went black, and I could feel myself about to faint. I dropped to the floor just to keep myself from falling harder.

I’ve had the same thing happen from a tiny kitchen cut. It’s super annoying because I’m not squeamish about blood at all, but my body just doesn’t care.

And then there’s donating blood. I was squeezing the stress ball like you’re supposed to, but I kept going when I should’ve stopped. Next thing I knew, I was dreaming about standing in some cliché green field, clouds overhead, telling myself how nice it was.

Suddenly I remembered: “Wait, wasn’t I doing something? Oh right, I was giving blood.” Then, out of nowhere, I shouted “BLOODMOBILE!” I woke up to everyone staring. Let’s just say I haven’t been too eager to donate again.

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