![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Have you ever fainted?
Dec. 8th, 2008 07:00 amI'm going to sound a bit loony when I say this, but I don't mind fainting the way I seem to do it.
I mean, it's disorienting, I dislike what it does to the people who are worried about me and trying to get me to a spot where I won't hurt myself, and I intensely dislike being helpless. But the actual loss of consciousness part is interesting. I start to spiral from this world into the one that exists only in my own brain. My left brain seems to shut down entirely, leaving - music. Whatever song was on constant replay in my head gets magnified to symphonic proportions, driving every care before it.
The first time I fainted was in a gym at McMaster University around 1997. The song at the time was a techno mix that had been bugging me for days, so I didn't get the full joy of it that time. (It also didn't help that, not knowing what was happening, I wasn't prepared - so I fell off the exercise bike and broke my glasses on my forehead. Ow.) The second time was the following summer. Some cousins from England were visiting, and we were doing the tourist thing in Niagara on the Lake, followed by climbing Brock's Monument - a huge tower with many steps, commanding a magnificent view of the Royal Botanical Gardens and the Niagara Gorge. In a café an hour before, I'd heard the Flower Duet, and it was replaying through my head. Fainting at the top of a few hundred stairs isn't fun, but I had enough warning this time to position myself with my feet dangling between two railings and my head leaning against the same, so I wasn't in danger of doing the domino effect on the tourists coming up behind us. And that rush of Flower Duet as I lost consciousness is on my list of most pleasant memories of that day.
This time, the song was Sure on this Shining Night, which I linked to last week and have been listening to off and on since then. It was another excellent choice for a fainting song. My brain went through about half of it, beginning to wake up shortly after the high A. I didn't think about the high A, as I have every other time I've listened to the song - I have to sing that A in choir, after all. No, I was just feeling my spirit soar over the landscape at night, weeping for wonder. It was glorious.
It was a decided letdown to return to consciousness, a worried Piet hovering over me and a nurse pressing a juice cup into my hand.
I'm not seeking out opportunities to faint, of course, but when they come I don't mind them much. They feel bad before and after, but the "during" makes up for both.
I mean, it's disorienting, I dislike what it does to the people who are worried about me and trying to get me to a spot where I won't hurt myself, and I intensely dislike being helpless. But the actual loss of consciousness part is interesting. I start to spiral from this world into the one that exists only in my own brain. My left brain seems to shut down entirely, leaving - music. Whatever song was on constant replay in my head gets magnified to symphonic proportions, driving every care before it.
The first time I fainted was in a gym at McMaster University around 1997. The song at the time was a techno mix that had been bugging me for days, so I didn't get the full joy of it that time. (It also didn't help that, not knowing what was happening, I wasn't prepared - so I fell off the exercise bike and broke my glasses on my forehead. Ow.) The second time was the following summer. Some cousins from England were visiting, and we were doing the tourist thing in Niagara on the Lake, followed by climbing Brock's Monument - a huge tower with many steps, commanding a magnificent view of the Royal Botanical Gardens and the Niagara Gorge. In a café an hour before, I'd heard the Flower Duet, and it was replaying through my head. Fainting at the top of a few hundred stairs isn't fun, but I had enough warning this time to position myself with my feet dangling between two railings and my head leaning against the same, so I wasn't in danger of doing the domino effect on the tourists coming up behind us. And that rush of Flower Duet as I lost consciousness is on my list of most pleasant memories of that day.
This time, the song was Sure on this Shining Night, which I linked to last week and have been listening to off and on since then. It was another excellent choice for a fainting song. My brain went through about half of it, beginning to wake up shortly after the high A. I didn't think about the high A, as I have every other time I've listened to the song - I have to sing that A in choir, after all. No, I was just feeling my spirit soar over the landscape at night, weeping for wonder. It was glorious.
It was a decided letdown to return to consciousness, a worried Piet hovering over me and a nurse pressing a juice cup into my hand.
I'm not seeking out opportunities to faint, of course, but when they come I don't mind them much. They feel bad before and after, but the "during" makes up for both.
