The fugue event
I had a pretty distressing medical experience the other day. I now feel completely fine, and the doctors who checked me out afterward told me that there’s no sign of any problem. But it was scary at the time. Below is a description of what happened, with various details elided.
No advice, please. I have been evaluated by a team of medical professionals, who had significantly more information about the situation than I’m providing in this post.
I came to full consciousness with afternoon light coming through the window, in a room that I didn’t quite recognize, near a person who I recognized as Kat.
I had a vague idea that I had just had a dream, though the dream slipped from my mind immediately.
I tried to figure out what room it was—I thought maybe it was a room in my house? But no, the things in it didn’t look familiar. Maybe it was a room at Kat’s place?
But I didn’t know what city or state we were in (or what the likely options were). I couldn’t imagine what was outside the door of the room, or what kind of a home we were in.
I finally told Kat something like “I know this is a scary thing to say, but I don’t know where we are.” Kat told me that we were at her place. Part of the left side of my face was kind of tingling, as was the back of my left hand (but not anywhere else on my body), which made me think maybe I had had a stroke. Kat did a couple of basic stroke tests (such as checking my eye dilation and asking me to stick my tongue out (I don’t remember that part)), and calmed me down. She also asked me who the President was, and we both laughed that it was such a standard question-to-ask-in-these-kinds-of-circumstances but in fact I was bewildered and worried—the only President name I could think of was Clinton, and I was pretty sure that wasn’t right but I had no idea what the right name was. It wasn’t until quite a while later that I remembered Trump.
(Kat later told me that before I said that I didn’t know where we were, she and I had been having a conversation for about twenty minutes, and she asked me about something that apparently I didn’t want to talk about, and I said that I was confused and scared. And then I said the same thing a couple more times, each time sounding like I didn’t know I had said it before. I still have no memory of that whole conversation.)
We made a couple of calls to people who could advise us, and we decided to go to the emergency room of a nearby hospital.
I started to recognize a couple of things in the house that were reassuringly familiar, which helped start to settle me down about where I was. And some other things came back to me over the next few minutes—the layout of the house, where my things were, who various other people were, etc.
We gathered some stuff together to keep us occupied in case we need to wait for a long time in the ER waiting room, and we put on masks, and we walked to the hospital. (As we went down some steps, Kat stayed a couple steps ahead/below, in case I lost balance. But by this point I was physically feeling fine.) We found our way to the ER, and checked in with the desk person.
The waiting room wasn’t very full. We waited a little while and then got taken into a room for some basic tests—resistance against hand pressure, what I could feel on my left and right legs, etc. I think the idea was to see if I was in the midst of a stroke. I talked with a couple of different medical people, and Kat told them that I had been talking lucidly during the period I couldn’t remember, and they seemed pretty sure that I wasn‘t in any immediate danger. So they sent us back to the waiting room.
Later, they drew some blood samples (very smooth/painless blood draw (unusual for me); really good phlebotomist) and had me provide a urine sample. Then they sent me back to the waiting room.
At some point in all of this, I canceled my flight home, and contacted the car rental agency to ask if they could come get the car I had rented, because it seemed clear to me that I shouldn’t be driving. (They sent a tow truck to pick up the car.)
Also at some point, I contacted my managers at work and told them I wouldn’t be in the office the next day. And I contacted other people who I had scheduled calls with for that next day, to cancel with them.
After some more time in the waiting room, the medical people took me into a private room (well, there was a glass wall that opened on some medical-office cubicles, but they drew a curtain across the room to block the bed from view) and gave me a nice cloth gown to wear. I put it on and lay down on the hospital bed there, and they brought in a very pleasantly warm blanket to put over me. They attached a pulse monitor to my finger and a blood pressure cuff to my arm, and did some more of the same kinds of basic stroke tests they had done before. They also did an EKG—I don’t think I’ve ever had one of those before.
Eventually, they took me to get a CT scan of my head. They had me sit in a wheelchair to go to the CT room; by this time, I was pretty sure I wasn’t having any balance problems, but they had given me a wristband that said something like FALL RISK, so I guess they didn’t want to take chances. (And I was barefoot by this point anyway, so it was just as well to not have to walk around in the hospital.) They wheeled me down a couple of hallways with press-button-to-open-automatic-door doors at the ends, and took me into the CT room.
I guess I had vaguely assumed that a CT scan had basically the same kinds of restrictions/precautions as an MRI (I had my first MRI a couple months ago), but nope, it was a lot simpler from my perspective. I removed my hearing aids and glasses (but not my earring—I didn’t even think of that), and the technician said I should/could leave my watch on. They had me lie down and slid the bed until my head was in the machine, where I would have looked closer at the interesting spinning parts except there was a label inside the machine that said something like Do not look at laser, so I just closed my eyes. The scan itself took no more than a minute, I think.
They took me back to the room with the hospital bed, and I lay there and chatted with Kat for a while, and eventually the medical people came back and told me that the tests all showed nothing wrong, so there’s nothing for me to worry about unless it happens again. They said I was clear to fly and to drive.
Despite a couple of minor mixups, the hospital staff was great. Almost everyone I interacted with was friendly and calm and helpful. Between them and Kat (and remote support from Kam and others), I felt very taken care of. (I’m sure it didn’t hurt that I’m white—unlike most of the other patients in the waiting room, but like most of the medical people—and presented as coherent and calm.)
But even after we got back to Kat’s place, I was still a little freaked out by two aspects of the situation: (1) having lost some time, with no memory of the conversation she and I had; and (2) having an extended period of not knowing where I was after I regained full consciousness.
We tentatively guessed that I hadn’t really been awake during the twenty minutes or so when Kat had been talking with me—that it was something like talking in my sleep, or the kind of unconscious interaction that people sometimes get from taking Ambien. I hadn’t taken Ambien, but the general idea seemed maybe somewhat similar. So I now have a paradigm that I can comfortably fit that part of the experience into—I still don’t know why it happened (though we came up with a couple of possibilities), but it’s a similar effect to various things that I know about.
The disorientation part still freaks me out a little. It started out kinda like waking up from a vivid dream and being a little unclear on where I am; that’s happened plenty of times in the past. But when I’ve had that confusion before, it has never (I don’t think) lasted more than a few seconds after I’m fully awake, and this was a lot longer than that. And this was a more comprehensive disorientation and lack of memory than those waking-up moments, and this one continued even after I started consciously trying to orient myself.
At some point after we got back from the hospital, it occurred to me that Kat’s ceiling fan results in flickering light; I’ve been in plenty of rooms with ceiling fans, so that isn’t the whole answer, but it does make me wonder whether that was a factor and whether it resulted in some kind of seizure. But I’m totally talking through my hat in this paragraph—I haven’t yet asked any medical people whether that’s even remotely plausible. (But I plan to; no need to speculate about it.)
Anyway. I slept pretty well that night, and was still fine in the morning, and took a plane home, and all seems to still be well. So I think I’m okay. It was kind of a scary series of events, but I don’t seem to be experiencing any ill effects at this point.
But I’ll definitely be discussing all of this with my doctor.
