[ExI] Class Differences Among Black People

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On 31/05/07, Amara Graps <amara at amara.com> wrote:

After a painful night not sleeping well, on the next Tuesday morning, I
> got up and felt a little dizzy. Went to the bathroom, where I felt even
> more dizzy, and so sat for a bit waiting for the dizziness to pass. Then
> I got up and bamm!, I passed out. It was so fast that I didn't know
> where I fell until I woke up a minute later and saw that I was in the
> hall outside of my bathroom. Nothing was broken, only a nasty bump on my
> chin where it hit the hard floor, and I had the knob of the food pantry
> drawer in my hand where I had apparently grabbed it as I went down. The
> two bottles of wine that were standing on the floor next to the pantry
> were only knocked over by my fall, and luckily did not break.
>
> So what happened? I have my medical book and with that and the Web, I
> learned that it was probably not anything serious. Everyone once in
> their life faints ("syncope"). Often it is first thing in the morning,
> and sometimes in the bathroom too, due to 'liquid' change in pressure. I
> wasn't on medication (even though my back was killing me, I hate taking
> aspirin), however, I didn't have influenza either, so I asked the doctor
> boyfriend "Gianluca" of my good friend in my town if he could check my
> blood pressure. Soon after, he checked it, and said that it is low, but
> not terribly low, and he guesses that there might have been
> stress-induced heart arrythemia that caused less blood to my head for a
> brief moment compounding the other pressure change stuff, that was why
> it happened so fast. He said though, that if he were me, he would see his
> regular doctor to be sure.


I think your book and doctor friend were right: it sounds absolutely typical
of postural hypotension. The crucial bit of information is that it happens
after standing quickly from a lying or sitting position; if it were due to a
cardiac or neurological cause, there would be no relationship to posture,
and vertigo is completely different again. An ECG and blood count might have
been worth doing, but if you were otherwise well and the story was exactly
as you described, having an MRI and dynamic ECG monitoring sounds like
overkill, and that's almost certainly what you would have been told had you
presented to an Australian GP or emergency department. I am guessing that if
you had been told that at the Italian hospital you might have thought they
were fobbing you off, because you don't seem to have a lot of faith in the
system, which is a problem even apart from from any actual systemic
problems.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou
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