I realized last night that going to school this morning would mark the first Friday of classes I had attended all semester. Because first there was the failed myelogram attempt, then the myelogram, then the spinal fluid leak/blood patch. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to being at school all day Friday, but I was feeling especially proud of myself for making it through this week. It hasn’t been easy, to say the very least.

At around noon I was sitting in the last part of my morning lecture, totally engrossed in what was surprisingly interesting material, presented by my very favorite instructor, when something just went wrong.

It was as if the entire room moved around my head. But not in the way that I usually get dizzy. It was such a foreign feeling that for a moment, I was sure I was having a seizure.

The spinning continued for what felt like an eternity, but was probably really only 10-20 seconds. And then my vision normalized and the room was still once again.

But in the still room, my heart began to pound. I assumed it was anxiety and I slouched down to try to make myself flatter and took big deep breaths. I’ve done the racing heart thing before, I thought I could manage it. But nothing I did seemed to matter. It just beat faster and faster.

I finally grabbed my friend who was sitting next to me and asked her to feel my pulse. She put her hand on my wrist for a second and before I knew it, she was pulling me out of class and into the hallway. On her way out she grabbed two of our instructors (who are health care professionals). When I got into the hallway, one of the instructors tried to take my pulse. But it was literally so fast that she couldn’t keep count, she guessed it was probably near 200 beats per minute, but she couldn’t get a good count. I tried to focus on my breathing and on relaxing, but even after a few minutes of calm breathing my heart rate wouldn’t normalize and before long I was lightheaded and losing feeling in my fingers and toes.

The laid me down in the middle of the hallway, made me drink water, put a cool cloth on my neck and very very slowly, my heart slowed. To 150 beats per minute (my normal resting heart rate is between 60 and 70, when I exercise, I have to really seriously focus to break 110).

The decision was made that I would go to the student health center to be checked out, but not before the entire second year class, all 96 of them, got out of a class in the room next to ours and walked by. Because all I really needed was a heaping pile of embarrassment on top of the rapid heart rate, lightheadedness and trembling that I couldn’t control.

We got to the student health center the instructors had to leave, so it was me, all alone in a room, waiting for the doctor. My blood pressure was high, my pulse was still 120 and I was alone. I am still pretty impressed with how I handled the anxiety, but there were moments where I thought I would surely pass out alone in the room or have a heart attack and no one would be there to help me.

After an EKG, urinalysis, an intramuscular injection of an anti-nausea/dizziness med, 2 failed and 1 successful attempt at blood work, we found the likely source of the problem. I’ve been fighting off a small cold all week (one I had almost successfully convinced myself was allergies, but no) and I had developed a mild sinus infection, but the bigger problem was that through the production of massive snot quantities and my body trying to recover from last week’s spinal fluid leak, that I was dehydrated. Nevermind that I’ve been upping my fluid intake and taking super good care of myself, my urine sample showed that I wasn’t just dehydrated, I was really dehydrated.

We are still waiting on the bloodwork to make sure that there’s nothing else going on, but it would appear that I need to deal with the sinus infection and dehydration and all will be well again. If I get dizziness anything like today, my heart races or if my headache gets dramatically worse I’m supposed to go to an ER post haste. But I think I can speak for everyone in my life when I say that we really don’t want to do that.

I’ve relived the unpleasantry of this morning in my head about a hundred times today. The feeling of helplessness, the terror of the room spinning, the heart beating so fast I thought it might burst. It certainly wasn’t the worst thing I’ve experienced, but the way it caught me off guard, scared me and completely incapacitated me, was terrifying.

It was horribly scary and frustrating all at once. I missed yet another class, I drew attention to myself that I DID NOT WANT, and even though I’ve been trying so hard to take good care of myself, I’ve failed again. I know it’s not a huge deal but I have worked so hard this week to do what needed to be done, to get enough sleep, to pace myself so I’d have the energy for 5 full days of class. And despite all that, I had a heart rate so fast that a medical professional couldn’t count it and vertigo that has left a nightmarish memory I may never shake.

It just seems like making it through one week of school really shouldn’t be this complicated.

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