Follow the Senior Hummingbird

“I feel dizzy,” was the last thing I said before fainting in my yoga class. According to my teacher and classmates, I sank to the mat and turned alternately gray, white, and blue. My body became ice cold and then I started to sweat profusely. I awoke to the voice of my yoga teacher saying, “Breathe” and then the paramedics arrived.
Even from my prone view and very foggy brain, I could tell that the paramedics worked quickly as a team, communicating constantly with one another and also with me. They quickly reassured me that my heart was okay, and mentioned “vago-vasal” which I vaguely understood meant my heart rate had been increasing until my blood pressure suddenly sank. But why?
How could this be happening to me? I’m a healthy person who could only remember fainting once at the age of 18 after catching bronchial pneumonia three times one winter. The faces changed from the paramedics to the Emergency Room Team who connected all sorts of things all over my body. I was thankful that one of my yoga buddies had come to the Emergency Room with me.
Eventually they told me I was dehydrated, and I told them that I had recently been bitten by a tick in Yellowstone National Park. The doctor dismissed the tick bite, saying it couldn’t be responsible for my condition in such a few days. And so, fluids poured in while one arm was pinned down by an overactive blood pressure cuff that kept throttling my arm. The other arm was pinned down by the intravenous needle.
Explaining that I had just had a very rigorous week working on Wild Lands Restoration near Grand Teton National Park, followed by camping in Yellowstone National Park, and due to my night owl nature, was sleep deprived, the doctor decided to chalk it up to exhaustion and dehydration and send me home after rehydration. He returned five minutes after telling me I would be released to say that he had reconsidered after realizing I was older than I looked and he wanted to hospitalize me for one night on a heart monitor.
There was a nagging pain in my left arm which had the intravenous flowing through and I mentioned it a few times to the nurse. She said it was just the needle in the wrist area that would cause pain when I bent the wrist. Eventually, I convinced her that the pain was higher up around my muscle. She finally looked under the gown and a strange look crossed her face. Someone who had intended to draw blood from my arm had left a tourniquet on my upper arm for at least the last 3 hours!! There was an ugly raw red mark when she finally released it. Apparently, this is a very big mistake and the person responsible would be severely disciplined, or even fired.
And so, I was sent upstairs for the night of being monitored. I was still more stunned at the day’s strange twist of events than anything else. But it was only the beginning of stranger things to come.
To Be Continued