I still hadn’t looked at it. I lifted the cuff of my jeans to expose the angry, swelling lump above my rain-soaked moccasin and immediately regretted it. The paramedic let out a low whistle and started to explain greenstick fractures, but I couldn’t hear him because a familiar feeling was taking over. My ears were filling with cotton and my vision had tunneled down to a pinpoint. I held up a finger, unable to talk but meaning, Excuse me a minute. I need . . . a minute . . . This thing is about to happen again.
I fainted. Simply saying it like that is misleading, though, because every time I do it—and I’ve done it far more times than I can count, beginning sometime around the third grade when I keeled over from my first blood test—there’s lots more unintentional theater involved. When I faint, I invariably try to fight it, which means I waste precious seconds tensing up instead of getting to the ground, and I end up falling like a cut tree. Once I’m there, likely having taken out either another person or a tray of glass things or food on the way down, I have what’s termed a “pseudoseizure,” where I convulse for a few seconds with my eyes wide open and rolled into the back of my head, and then I go limp. When I come to, I have no idea where I am for a few minutes and frequently use the time to burst into tears and start apologizing.
Fainting runs in my family, on my mother’s side. In my mind’s eye I can still see her lying on her back on any number of floors, public and private, with her feet propped up against the wall, her face pale against the sprawl of her curls, waving her hand limply as she reassures everyone around her, “I’m all right, I just feel a little faint.” Of all of us, my mother is the only one with sense enough, or perhaps humility, to lie down when she begins to feel like she might faint. “I get to the floor before the floor gets to me,” she says. A brief list of places she has lain in recent years: a movie theater, an allergist’s office, a florist shop, the oral surgeon’s office, and the emergency room (those last two not as patient but as mother of patient—from the ground she offered her hand for me to hold while I came to from wisdom tooth surgery and during repeated attempts to start an IV on me for an appendectomy). People bring her water in these situations and give each other looks.
I hate that I faint because everything about the act contradicts an image of myself that I have worked very hard, for a very long time, to cultivate. When I was in elementary school, I started to notice a term cropping up in discussions about me between my mother and various teachers: “high-strung.” Other times, trying to sugarcoat it, perhaps, they would use “artistic temperament” or “sensitive.” Often, my father’s absences and their effect on me were invoked to explain tendencies in my personality, to the point that I finally realized that being singled out for “special conversations” about stress or sadness with my teachers during recess meant that I was an object of pity, someone who wasn’t quite handling things. The realization offended me in the same way seeing the stewardesses give me the “I’m sorry” face at the airport did. You think I’m not brave; you think I’m weak. Since then, I have tried everything in my power to cultivate an image of steely, unflappable competence, to appear to the rest of the world to be the exact opposite of someone whose imagination can overreact to injury so much that I literally—and regularly—overrun my own neural circuits and crash twitching to the floor.
“I can’t get a radial.” John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” is playing softly in the background. I had that on CD—where is that CD? “Move that table. Excuse us, folks, can we get the gurney in here?” The smell of burned coffee, someone tugging at my sweatshirt, trying to pull it over my head. No! I’m not wearing a shirt underneath!
“Ma’am? Can you hear me? Are you on any medication for epilepsy? Ma’am?”
“I’m s-so sorryyy . . .” Oh, my God, oh, shit, that’s me. I’ve fainted again and I sound drunk.