I’m going there and I’m coming

I fainted for the first time at the age of 6 when I saw the blood that took the place of my first baby tooth falling out. My fainting spells are not like those of princesses, I don’t put my hand on my forehead and I slip slowly. My fainting spells are accompanied by convulsions and during those seconds, I dream that I am somewhere else, which makes waking up very confusing and distressing.

When the tooth episode occurred, my parents immediately took me to the doctor. I did several tests to see if I suffered from epilepsy. It wasn’t epilepsy.

Fainting has become a constant in my life. I fainted whenever I was vaccinated, when I drew blood, when I cut myself cooking, when I smelled a hospital (I went to see my father at recovery and ended up lying on the floor next to him). I even fainted in a pharmacy, I fainted just because they told me a story that involved blood or pain, and it even happened when I did an echocardiogram, for the simple fact that I was listening to my heart. When I got my first tattoo, the boy went out to get something and when he came back I had fallen off the stretcher with my face on the floor.

I went on a trip to Indonesia with my husband. One afternoon I sat reading at a beach bar while he went surfing. The bar was known as “Bar dos brasileiros” because it was frequented, almost exclusively, by surfers from Brazil, all of them very blessed in terms of what you see. I got up to get a drink, tripped and sprawled on the floor. I remember getting back on my feet with a smile, trying to maintain my dignity, but then I don’t remember anything else. I fainted. My husband came back from surfing and walked back and forth looking for me while I, lying on the floor of the “Bar dos Brasileiros”, came back to me, surrounded by people spraying my face with a spray of unknown content. To this day my husband thinks I fainted from pain, and I ended up walking the rest of the holidays with one with a sprained foot, but I believe that this time I fainted from embarrassment.

A few years ago I cut off my entire index finger with the magic wand. As I already know myself well, I said to my husband: “I’m going to faint there on the couch and it won’t be beautiful to see, but don’t be scared because I’ll be right back” and so it was. When I woke up he was panicking, wanting to call an ambulance.

While I was pregnant I never lost consciousness. I was afraid of affecting the babies and forced myself to think about other things while doing the blood collection and everything that a woman undergoes during pregnancy. When my children bleed I don’t feel like fainting either. Motherhood gives us superpowers.

It has always annoyed me a lot that I can’t control my body outside of pregnancies. I felt that in the war between the body and the head, the head always came out to lose and that, for someone with the need to control everything like me, was desperate. Now my head is already gaining a few times and I even managed to give blood, something I never believed I was capable of doing.

I learned later that what I suffer from has a name and is not just hysteria as I have thought all my life, it is vasovagal syncope and it is hereditary. This last information was transmitted to me the other day by the pediatrician, when my daughter’s first baby tooth fell out and I became the spectator for the first time.