I don’t remember when this was. It was either April or May of this year, but I do know it was 12:30 pm, and I really had to take a leak. But something wasn’t quite right. This wasn’t normal; it was extremely sudden and I felt as though I was going to explode. Even worse, I was right in the middle of class, which wasn’t done for another 10 minutes, and I was apparently parked too close to a stop sign.
At 12:40, when class is done, I’ll have 5 minutes to run outside, move the car, run back inside, get to my next class so I’m not late, then run to the bathroom (which was conveniently located across the hall) and conduct some business. Not as simple as it looks, apparently.
When the time came around to get everything done, it started off pretty well. For starters, I didn’t get a parking ticket – which isn’t that surprising, considering my school isn’t in an area visited by parking enforcement much – so that was definitely a good start. I made it to class on time, too. But I still had to use the bathroom, more so than any other time that I remember.
This is where it starts to go south. I went into the school bathroom like I’d done probably 100 times before, and I started to feel dizzy, but I didn’t have time to worry about that. I needed to relieve myself. But I was feeling progressively worse. By the time I was waiting for my assorted equipment to spring into action, I could barely see, and I was holding onto the supply pipe for the urinals just to stand.
And some indeterminate amount of time later, I woke up. The first thought that went through my head wasn’t very clear, and was something along the lines of “how did those toilets move to that side of the…” The next was “okay, let’s see here… where am I and how did I get here?!” The final semi-conscious thought I had was “wait a second, didn’t I have to use the bathroom really badly?”
Figuring out what had just happened was the mental equivalent of sitting on a chair filled with tacks. Or, in this case, a burning chair filled with sharpened railroad spikes… and covered in Liquid Plumber. I was quite alert now, but I was collapsed on a concrete bathroom floor; I’d been out for a while, maybe 30 seconds; I had a headache and I felt like I was going to throw up, which made me afraid I had a concussion (though it turned out I didn’t). On the bright side, nobody else was in the bathroom at the time, so I didn’t fall into, urinate on, or expose myself to anybody.
A few minutes later, after I managed to make myself upright and clean myself off a little, I went back to class, and decided to leave and go see a doctor. I didn’t actually leave though; some of the staff at my school thought it would be best for me to lie down and drink something, as I was oddly thirsty. I ended up going through about half a gallon of store brand fruit punch before I either wasn’t thirsty anymore or killed the bottle. After my mom picked me up (apparently, relapses are pretty common and nobody thought it would be a good idea for me to make the 20+ minute trip to my clinic on my own.
A while after we had stopped at my house for some fresh pants, we made it to the clinic, where after even more waiting, I got checked out. I didn’t have a concussion, which was always nice. Without going into too much detail here, relieving yourself when your heart rate is up can trigger a massive drop in blood pressure and a subsequent loss of consciousness. It could be worse though: it’s a rare condition, and only about 1 in 40 people are even at risk. On top of that, the loss of consciousness is intended to allow blood to flow more easily to the upper half of your body, and were it not for that, I'd have brain damage by now.