The Bad Beginning (Thank You, Lemony Snicket)

Alternate Title: I Am Very Good At Fainting 

Alright, I know everyone wants me to get right to the juicy stuff after teasing you with that introduction. What’s the diagnosis so I can Google it and leave?! 

No, no, sit down. This is my therapeutic story time. You get to find out at the same time I do. But not to worry, all shall be revealed. 

However… We are going to start around the time I was 6 years old, so you may be waiting a bit. 

I am the clumsiest person I know, and this was still true when I was a child.

Somehow, at some point in time, little Isabelle managed to fall in the bathroom so badly that she split her chin open. When her dad was trying to assess the damage/clean out the grievous wound she had just endured, he was holding her up where she could see it in the mirror. We would learn this was a mistake when she flopped forward like a dead fish and banged her head on the faucet so hard she had to go to urgent care to get a CT scan for potential head trauma (as well as get stitches in her chin, that were later removed on CHRISTMAS, by the way). Yes, Isabelle had fainted for the first time. Wow, what a milestone! (If she only knew what was coming for her. But to be fair, this remains of the gnarlier incidents. She had the scar and prominent forehead bruise to prove it.) 

The second time I fainted was in first grade. And it was all Katie’s fault. We were sitting at lunch and, being the generous friend she is, Katie gave me some of her NuGo bar (this was a deluxe treat that I only got at her house because they were expensive). See, she caused this! Because when I bit into it, something went a little funky in my mouth. I didn’t notice, but we still remember her asking me “Did you eat strawberries…?” 

No, reader. I did not eat strawberries. That would be the mouth blood that spelled my impending doom. At some point I did actually lose my tooth, and when the lunch table noticed, random kids were screaming for the recess teacher in excitement without me having to lift a hand. I probably felt like I was prancing on a runway as I was escorted to the nurse’s office. Bye, Katie! See you at recess! (Spoiler alert: I did not see anyone at recess that day.) 

As it turns out, it is pretty standard for a kid in an elementary school to lose a tooth. They had these special little envelopes to put teeth in, which honestly sounds creepy in hindsight, but you gotta do what you gotta do. The school nurse gave me my envelope and we secured my tooth. This one was a real bleeder, so I was holding some tissues to my mouth as she got the phone to call home. It is also standard procedure to call mom and dad and tell them what happened, which in hindsight is adorable. My dad is the one who picked up, so he was the lucky one on the line with me when the nurse grabbed my shoulders to turn me towards the mirror and showed me my mouth where my tooth was newly missing! Look! Exciting, right? No, I fainted. 

The lesson we have learned here is to never, ever show me my own blood through a reflective surface. 

What my dad hears on the other end is the phone dramatically clatter to the ground, and then the nurse picks it up and tells him she is calling 911. 

I can’t remember if my parents or the paramedics got there first, but that was a pretty traumatizing day for my wee young self. 

I do remember that I was wearing a thick and fuzzy striped sweater that day. When I woke up on the floor my teacher was there, the principal was there, the school secretaries were there, random other teachers and adults I didn’t know were there, and everyone was crowded around me. It was apparent how sweaty and stuffed up I was, so my teacher said we needed to get my coat and sweater off. Obviously, this helped, but here we cue years of childhood guilt because I thought she was disappointed in me for wearing a sweater and it was all my fault. 

Even though there was an obvious reason I had fainted, it was scary for everyone because I was so little, and my parents had to sign a fancy release form so that they could take me instead of the ambulance. 

At this point, it is well established that I faint at the sight of blood. One more incident would make it very well known that I also can’t handle talking about blood or other gross things. 

Allow me to set the scene. We are in a second grade classroom. It has a jungle theme. It is hella cute. The student desks are lined in rows facing the front. That day, we had a substitute teacher. That day there was a health lesson. We were being taught about dental care, which seems innocent enough. Just remind the kids to brush their teeth and send them on their merry way to recess! But no, this substitute teacher had a malicious scheme in mind. He was out to get me. 

By this I mean - he told the class that he had a root canal. Then proceeded to tell the class exactly what that was. While sitting at my desk, I fainted to my right on the boy sitting next to me, James (yes, James, I still remember you). Wanna know how poor James reacted? 

He panicked and STOOD UP. That’s right, young unconscious Isabelle was unceremoniously dumped on the floor and sustained her second head-injury-via-fainting on the metal bar of the desk. 

Now, this is the best part - wanna know what the teacher did? He asked if I was okay and continued class. I later had to raise my hand and ask to go to the nurse’s office. He said yes, but didn’t think to send someone to come get me, or call to let them know I was on the way, or at least send me down with a buddy, so that’s the story of how I slid my unsteady little booty down two flights of stairs to my new habitat, the nurse’s office. (I later heard they were not at all pleased with this substitute, for obvious reasons.) 

I still think of poor little Breanna, who was traumatized by witnessing this and told me years later that she thought I had just leaned down to pick up a pencil on the floor. When I didn’t come back up, she started crying and the sub still couldn’t be bothered to do anything. (In hindsight I’d just like to think that he panicked and really didn’t know what to do, but dang, son.) 

One time I remember running into a vacuum cleaner so hard another tooth fell out, but I can’t remember if I actually fainted or if the pain and trauma was just from me, you know, running face-first into a vacuum cleaner. (I was about 10 when this happened, but it wouldn’t surprise anyone if it happened again. I have a bit of a reputation around these parts.) 

So it goes. I faint when I see blood or when triggering topics are discussed - and episodes that could be avoided, aren’t, because I am too shy to speak up for myself and tell people to shut up.

Often, I don’t faint all the way, but I experience what I would later learn to be called presyncope. This is a quintessential term in The Dictionary of Me. 

Basically, the medical term for fainting is syncope. Presyncope is all of the signs and symptoms leading up to fainting. It is also my least favorite feeling in the world, which is unfortunate. 

It usually starts with a heat flash where my entire body is suddenly and uncomfortably covered in a fine sheen of sweat. I am notorious for having constantly pink cheeks, but in this instance only, I have a sickly pallor and turn pale as a ghost. I only know this because one time I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror while this was happening and didn’t recognize who I was. The room starts spinning and I feel like I am outside of my own body. I can touch my hands but they are not my own. My vision begins to blur and gradually gray more and more around the edges. Everything sounds muffled and distant, as though I were underwater. I always hear a faint ringing in my ears that gets increasingly louder and louder. I feel nauseous and sometimes like I suddenly have to go to the bathroom. I experience this all at once, and it gets worse and worse and louder and brighter until I black out completely. Pretty much every time I have fainted, I have woken up and started immediately crying. It is a very disorienting and scary experience. Even though I am a well established and very notorious fainter by this point, I still never know where I am or what happened when I first wake up. Plus, I feel absolutely terrible and wish I could unexist. I remember one time an EMT kept asking me, “why are you crying?” And I didn’t really have an answer for her. I don’t know lady, why aren’t you crying?! 

A minor thing to note for later is that around the same time I fainted for the first time (kindergarten-first grade age), I also had my first panic attack. I grew up a highly anxious child/teen/adult, and while that is not the focus of this blog, this information will come into play later. I began CBT therapy and saw a psychiatrist for the first time around the age of 12. I was diagnosed with panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, and a smorgasbord of other things. My panic attacks have mostly disappeared, but I still struggle with the other things - especially GAD. They are really not kidding when they say “generalized anxiety.” That basically means I feel a sense of impending doom no matter what, and I always have. Even if I am perfectly relaxed and everything in my life is totally fantastic and nothing is going wrong, I feel anxious 100% of the time because that is simply how my brain is hardwired. Usually there’s something specific I’m paranoid about, but a lot of the time, I don’t know why I’m worried or tense, I just am. 

I remember dealing with this awful feeling as a young child and misinterpreting it as guilt. I didn’t know why I was feeling guilty, because I didn’t do anything wrong, but I thought that God was punishing me. I felt even guiltier because I didn’t know why I felt so horrible and guilty. This was a huge weight on my chest. One day in the car, when we had pulled into the garage but before we had gotten out, I finally had the courage to confess my supposed sins to my mom (this is where a lot of dramatic mother-daughter talks have happened over the years). I told her I was SO guilty. It’s kind of hard to advise a kid who is upset because they think they did something bad but they don’t know what it is, so she told me to pray about it and ask God for forgiveness for whatever I was upset about. Years later, the revelation would come to me that this feeling I was trying so hard to express to her was literally just anxiety. Little me didn’t know what that was or that there was already a term for it, but the horrible weight of anxiousness on your chest sure feels similar to guilt. 

This story kind of makes me teary, because I wish someone had been there to know exactly what that little girl was experiencing and tell her it was normal and okay. God loves her and is not mad at her for doing anything wrong (although there is that one time she lied about eating a jolly rancher). It would have been a huge relief to know that it was my brain, because I did feel real guilt compounded on top of the anxiety for feeling how I did. It sure sucked, but that was my introduction to how I would permanently feel for the rest of my life. 

The serotonin levels in my brain are all kinds of screwed up, but that kind of runs in the family, unfortunately. I have “trial and errored” almost the entire SSRI class (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) to no avail - that was about a decade of long-term medication failures. That is a whole other post! As of right now, I am happily on my very first SNRI (serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor), venlafaxine. I love her. 

Yet another thing to note is that as long as I can remember, I have had chronic headaches. They are just existing in my skull all the time. In fact, I have one now while I’m writing this, and it’s been here at least three days. I could not tell you an onset period because that is and always has been my “normal.” I know that I have been experiencing them since I was at least 10 years old, because I was recently looking through my medical records and I had another CT scan around that time (because jeez, what the hell is wrong with this kid?). Later in life I would get a horrifying kind of migraine, but we are not quite there yet. 

ONE MORE THING! I got my period pretty young, around 11 or 12 years old. I didn’t have the proper education to realize that the first time might be old/dry blood, which is ~interesting~ and brown in appearance. So, naturally, I thought I had just shit my pants, changed, and moved on with my day. The next time I went to the bathroom, I realized (to my ultimate horror) what was really happening down there. That day, I wore my first pad and waddled down the stairs like a penguin while my dad literally pointed and laughed. I think that’s a decently funny first period story, but it didn’t stay sunshine and rainbows (and penguins) for long. I would end up having very extreme, heavy, and painful periods that would keep me out of school for a week at a time (the first several days from valid pain and suffering, the rest from panic attacks about going back because I had already missed so much). “Period poops” are a real thing, but mine were taken to a whole new level, my goodness. 

OH YEAH, ANOTHER THING! I have been chronically constipated, literally since I was a baby. My parents still talk about my famous baby poops. I swear this is really important for later. 

Anyways, when I’m on my period, this pre-existing level of constipation multiplies tenfold. Like, sitting-on-the-toilet-praying-to-God-wanting-to-die constipation. I can’t really paint a better picture than that. Now, I can’t remember the first time this happened, or when, but it was so bad that I literally fainted off the toilet. The first time it happened, I woke up stuck between the wall and the toilet; that was definitely not fun. I also smeared blood everywhere, which was gross. Luckily, I would get to do this many more times and practice sticking the landing a bit better - on towels that were laid out in preparation for this. 

Eventually, I was diagnosed with vasovagal syncope/neurocardiogenic syncope, and was told that I have a highly sensitive vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is a pretty big deal and runs a lot of stuff in our bodies behind the scenes (I’m trying to learn more about it, as mine is often in a pissy mood). It is the longest cranial nerve, and runs all the way from the brain to the bowel. With mine being as touchy as it is, and the unfortunate location of it running into part of the colon, me being constipated and trying to go to the bathroom is sometimes enough to trigger it to the point where I pass out. It doesn’t normally happen, unless I am on my period. This was a huge, constant problem, until my doctor became concerned about me hitting my head and put me on a birth control regimen where I only have my period once every three months. If I’m not on the pill, I am in agony 100% of the time and am 100% going to be fainting. On it, life is a dream. Except for literally everything else I have described and am about to describe. 

OH! ONE MORE THING!! Then I think we will have the absolute basics down. As long as I can remember, along with the headaches, I have experienced a term that I JUST learned a few days ago. I’m never done learning! Once more, I wish someone could go back to younger me, but this time to tell her, girl, that is not normal. 

The term I just learned from my new doctor is allodynia. Allodynia is a neurological condition where the body perceives pain from stimuli that is not supposed to provoke pain, like a light touch. I also just learned the term hyperalgesia, which is an increased sensitivity to feeling pain. 

The best way I can describe it is that my entire body is a bruise. It didn’t necessarily hurt when it was left alone, but when my skin was touched, it hurt and continued to hurt. 

For example, my sweet dad gives us shoulder massages sometimes when he walks behind us. My mom and sister love it. I would always yelp and shrink away. That was just quirky Isabelle being her quirky little self! From that brief innocent touch, I would feel pain radiating for minutes afterward and loudly complain.

(Thank you for the sentiment, Fajah.)

When I need to scratch an itch, it really hurts to do so, no matter how lightly, and bright red marks remain on my skin. The pressure it takes to turn a key in a lock hurts my hands and fingers. Heck, it hurts to turn a door knob. My purse strap hurts my shoulder. If I do something clumsy and predictable, like, say, miscalculate where I’m walking and ram my shoulder into a wall, I feel more intense pain that emanates for much longer than it should. A friendly poke on the shoulder elicits an “ow” from me, but for years people thought I was just being a wimp. I suppose I thought that, too, because I had absolutely no clue that not everyone experienced this until I was literally 21. Yes, people, I am still 21, and I thought this was perfectly normal for all of my life. I was and remain a giant, walking, tender bruise. 

JUST KIDDING, ONE MORE THING! I swear, it all ties together in the end! This also runs in my family, which is a little suspicious, for reasons that will be revealed later. This didn’t manifest until I was about 13, but I have a chemical sensitivity. Scented candles, perfumes, lotions, detergents, soaps, cleaners, car fresheners, you name it, it gives me a migraine. It gives my mom a migraine. It gives my sister horrible eczema. My grandmothers on both sides also react. If I am in the same room as you and you are wearing perfume, I have a headache for the rest of eternity. 

OH YEAH, AND! I have restless leg syndrome, as does my sister, and possibly my dad, and I suspect my brother. We’re just always always always always always always always moving and tapping our legs; that’s all there is to it. Again, just wait for why this is important later. 

I’m sure there are other ONE MORE THINGS! that I could add, but we are just gonna wrap it up and save them for later. Stay tuned for everything to get a whole lot worse!

Autonomically,

Isabelle