Yesterday, I had an eventful morning.
At around seven in the morning, a muscle cramp woke me up. Honestly, I didn’t think much of that fact. Muscle cramps happen sometimes and I’m more than capable of massaging one out.
What I didn’t expect was to pass out a few minutes later.
Normally, that doesn’t happen. I’ve almost never passed out. I can recall three incidents at most where I passed out and I knew the reason for two of them.
The first time was a case of exhaustion and overheating. I’d been in the kitchen with the door closed when I was seventeen and the stove was blazing. I was often deprived of sleep at the time and I was feeling the cold deeply, which was the reason I had the door closed in the first place. I wasn’t aware that I was overheating. (There’d even been an occasion where I didn’t notice the trousers I was wearing were melting. You’d think I’d notice that.)
The second time was at the beach in 2016. I’d had an infected sunburn and passed out due to a combination of fever and overexposure to the sun over the course of the week. (I wasn’t aware the sunburn was that bad. Honestly, it almost feels like a trend of not noticing stuff.)
The third time was yesterday, and I’m not certain what the cause was.
I was still horizontal when I started massaging the muscle cramp. However, the cramp wasn’t easing out and I was in quite a bit of pain. I started suffering from a ringing ear while this was happening. The pitch kept increasing, but I tried to breathe through it — it wasn’t the first time I’d had a ringing ear.
Since the muscle cramp wasn’t easing away, I figured that I didn’t have a good angle for massaging the cramp out. I decided to sit up. Once I’d finished repositioning, I started massaging the muscle cramp again.
That was when I started to feel sick.
I tried to breathe through the nausea. Just like I’d tried to breathe through the ringing. It wasn’t the first time I’d felt nauseated without a noticeable cause. (Anxiety, thanks for giving me a skewed perception of what counts as standard!)
I came to on the floor an indeterminate amount of time later. It could have been seconds. It could have been a few minutes. I didn’t know. What I did know was that I was still suffering that ringing; I had a hot head while the rest of me was freezing; and I felt like a puddle of gelatinous goop.
It didn’t help that half of me was under the bed and I almost had a face full of wardrobe.
(The room I sleep in isn’t that big.)
Coming to on the floor with no recollection of how I got there is a frightening thing. I don’t like it. I don’t like feeling tired and woozy, like I might pass out again after just coming to. I don’t like feeling so vulnerable without making a conscious choice. I don’t like having to be helped up the stairs while people run around me like headless chickens.
Mum fussed over me when she learned that I’d passed out and had me lie down in her bedroom. She got me a drink. She also insisted that I eat a banana even though I was still feeling terrible and didn’t want to eat. She took out her diabetic kit for testing her blood sugar levels and checked mine sometime after I’d eaten the banana. Apparently, the levels registered at 4.1 — which is quite low, but is considered within normal parameters.
But that was after a drink and a banana.
The blood sugar levels must have been much lower beforehand. I’m not sure why; I’d had dinner around the same time as all the other people in the house. I also had a decent amount of fluids and some cookies sometime after dinner. Much like the others in the house. But no one else experienced sugar levels low enough to pass out.
I went to the GP in the afternoon — because I’d passed out and because I had a tender spot afterwards. (It still hurts. Urgh.) That was the earliest appointment I could get. I described what happened to the GP and she asked me a few questions. Eventually, she concluded that it was a mere fainting spell and didn’t think there was much reason to be concerned.
So…low blood sugar levels for no discernible reason and I’m here thinking: what the heck.
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