Vasovagal Syncope
Got some emails back from last week:
I actually did have one man and one woman say they may be interested in the Laundry dating service!!! but have not managed to hook them up…YET. Quite excited about the whole prospect of matchmaking, in a benevolent-not-scathing-like-usual way. HURRAH, so I will, or maybe will not, keep you posted, depending on whether they sign a release form. He he.
I have a correction from someone else:
for the record - and not that I actually like the song or anything but I AM a music nerd and therefore feel the intense need to correct people - the rogue traders line is actually “baby baby baby, you are my voodoo child, my voodoo child”.
Thanks for clearing that up Lauren, you big nerd - oo that was a bit aggressive, didn’t mean it.
ERM - so I think I promised you a few weeks ago to tell you about Vasovagal syncope.
no you might be thinking as I was thinking, when I first was diagnosed with this - oh my god Rachel has a fatal disease, or maybe not, maybe you aren’t a typochrondriac (or whatever the phrase they’ve just invented is, for people who obsessively look up symptoms on the internet…… oh it’s cyberchondria).
This all started when I was on a long haul flight to Australia (I know I was young and not thinking about the emissions). One minute I was crying at the bit where George Bailey realises that It’s Wonderful Life, the next minute I was lying face down in my spongy mashed potato; the air hostess had to haul me over her shoulder to get me to the back of the plane for a lie down and Kathryn (travel buddy) came back from the loo to find me with an oxygen mask on.
So this happened a few times (not all on planes) and so I decided, once in Sydney and benefiting from our NHS-medicare-too-good-to-be-true-double-deal (ie Poms get free doc appointments) to go and get it checked out. Oz is not like Britain, so instead of the Doctor saying “I think you need to drink more water and get more sleep” they decided to put me on a holter monitor for a day. This heart monitor thingy works by you suction cupping pads to different parts of your torso and it measures your pulse rate. So I was having a regular day at the office, but in the evening as it was around Christmas time, we visited an open air concert called Carols in the Park. So what with the open air picnic, the festive spirit and sublime temperatures, I may have got carried away and done a full ballet routine in the middle of the National Gallery Piazza including several pas du chats (the leap of the cat) and the polka.
So I went back to the doctor to get my results and she said - “yes your heart rate is perfectly normal apart from an unusual peak at around 11.30pm, can you remember what you were doing around that time Rachel….”
I really felt like I couldn’t explain to her that, despite the apparent seriousness of my imagined condition and the vast expense of the holter monitor, that I thought it was fine to do a one woman performance of swan lake. I suppose actually that even without the heart monitor, it would be quite difficult to justify. So I said that on that particular evening I was running late and I had to run for the last train home. I could tell she didn’t believe me…and don’t like to think about what she thought I was actually doing to raise my heart rate so.
Anyway, Vasovagal Syncope really means sort of emotional fainting like ladies in the 1950s; here are the triggers:
Typical triggers for vasovagal syncope include:
- prolonged standing
- any painful or unpleasant stimuli, such as
- giving blood
- watching someone else give blood
- prolonged exposure to heat
- Extremes of emotions
- hunger
- nausea or vomiting
- urination (’micturition syncope’) or defecation
- swallowing (’deglutition syncope’)
I’ll leave it up to you you to decide which of the above triggered my film watching “moment”.