Vasovagal Syndrome: I explain what it is and how I live with it – 02/25/2024 – The Worst of the Week

Diana writes to me asking what the hell Vasovagal Syndrome is, which I always talk about on my podcasts. I wouldn’t know how to explain it clinically and biologically speaking. Nor am I aware whether the clarification, which I would not know how to give, is better defined as “clinically and biologically speaking”. But I know what I feel

At 14, I tasted alcohol for the first time at a friend’s house, at her birthday party. It was something called “silk stocking” (condensed milk with vodka) and God knows why the girl’s father gave it to a bunch of kids. I downed that little cup that smelled like cheap cream in one fell swoop and it was as if a giant hand reached through my skull and ripped my soul out through the back of my neck. I ran to the bathroom of the girl’s house not knowing if I was going to vomit, pass out, shit myself or cry (I did all of that).

I lay on the bathroom floor and my hands turned to rocks and were completely bent. Thirty years later I would call this a beautiful hysterical conversion reaction, but let’s go back to when I was 14 years old.

My parents came to pick me up and they must have thought that I consumed the entire bar at the girl’s house, the damage that five sips of alcohol had done to my body.

After that day, I began to realize that half a glass of wine was enough to make me dizzy, sick and trigger a sensation very similar to panic attacks (and I believe that I only developed anxiety attacks from these triggers). . I’ve never been drunk, I’ve always been sick before. Until I decided, I think at the age of 30, that I would no longer consume any alcoholic beverages.

At seventeen, I was studying for the university entrance exam and the nervousness of that phase made me forget to eat decently and, above all, at the right times. One day, on the subway, I just blacked out and passed out for six minutes. They took me to an infirmary and nothing. I wouldn’t go back. They put adrenaline in my arm (it was like that scene from the movie “Pulp Fiction”) and I sat on the stretcher curling my tongue and saying that I wanted mommy. Mommy. I want mom.

Mom then took me to the neurologist who ordered a test called the Tilt Table Test. I’m sorry if one day you have to undergo this hospital torture. It consists of staying in a very surreal posture (I’m not going to google her name, but you’re neither standing nor lying down) and they even tied me up with some leather belts and placed sublingual medications to increase my heart rate absurdly. Lying down and immobilized, my brain understood that I was running away from hungry lions. The idea of ​​the exam is to give your little body syncope. My arms became so stiff and bent that they needed to be massaged for half an hour. At the end of the exam, I heard the cardiologist saying to my mother: “She tested positive for Vasovagal Syndrome.” It’s always a beautiful moment when we are approved for something.

Since I was a child, I feel ill in hot, closed, crowded environments or without immediate access (in case I have hypoglycemia or low blood pressure — and it always does) to water, food, ventilation and a stool to sit on. A lot of time standing during shows, even when I was in my early twenties, caused me a lot of fatigue and spinal irritation.

Yes, you run the risk of your unbearable friends just being vasovagal.

Today, my general practitioner forces me to work my leg and carry water in my bag. I still have the feeling that salt and Coca-Cola bring me back to life faster than water, but he insists that the big thing is staying hydrated all day long. It has happened that I sleep too much and wake up in the middle of a crisis, so I leave water and food next to the bed.

I learned to lie on the floor and put my legs up wherever I felt sick. I’ve done it on the floor of a restaurant, in front of everyone (I had drunk half a glass of wine), I’ve done it on a sidewalk in Vila Madalena (it was too hot and the line at the restaurant didn’t move), I’ve done it at home by Tom Cavalcante (the meeting was late and I didn’t have lunch), I already did this at a film reading with Fábio Porchat (I took medication for a headache and my blood pressure dropped) and three weeks ago I passed out in the Gol boarding line, trying to returning from Rio to São Paulo — the Galeão was without air conditioning. They brought me a wheelchair, but I thought it would be better to lie down on the floor and put my legs on top of the wheelchair (at that time a girl took a photo of me and said she loved my books).

Ah, I remembered a great one. A bad one, actually. One time, I believe it was back in 2006, I went to pick up a young man at his house for dinner, but we thought it best to skip the tucupi duck and just devour our young bodies. I forgot that I had Vasovagal Syndrome and, in the middle of sex, I started to feel really sick. He was happy, thinking that my indisposition was a way of saying that I hadn’t taken care of his manly performance. He kept asking scary and prohibitive questions in 2024, like “I’ve never seen one like that, right?” No disease will ever be worse than the decadent male at the turn of the century (these days, at least on my radar, that obviously sleazy type has disappeared).

Well, that’s it, Diana. If one day you see me lying on the floor somewhere, with my legs up, sucking a cold bottle of Minalba as if my survival on Earth depends on it, you know it’s just another normal day.

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