Syncope (/ˈsɪŋ.kə.pi/)
When I fell.
“You’ve had a syncope,” the ER nurse told me.
“Actually,” I corrected her, “I just fainted.”
“That’s what a syncope is,” she explained patiently. “It’s a temporary loss of blood flow to the brain, which results in fainting.”
It was June 27 of last year, early evening. Things had been going pretty well for me. I’d recently come out of a deep, months-long depression. I was returning from the delightfully named Fabiola Building at Kaiser in Oakland. The driver of the Kaiser shuttle van had been playing really cool R&B music, and I’d complimented her on it. Soon I’d be back home in Berkeley, watching TV with Sara.
I stepped down from the van onto the sidewalk in front of the MacArthur BART station in Oakland. Suddenly I started seeing stars and I felt dizzy — what in our family we’ve taken to calling “feeling woozly.” My body felt suddenly almost weightless, and I was losing my balance. I saw a pole with a sign on it a few feet away, along the curb, and I took a step towards it.
The next thing I knew, I was flat on the ground, face down. Disoriented, I looked up to see myself surrounded by concerned commuters. Rising unsteadily to my feet, feeling embarrassed, I tried to smile and assure people that I was okay.
“No, you’re not,” said a woman. She was holding out a packet of travel Kleenexes to me. I realized that I was bleeding profusely from my chin, which had apparently taken the brunt of my fall.
My van driver, who’d just completed her last shift for the day, said, “You’re coming with me to the Emergency Room.”
The concerned bystander with the Kleenexes, who’d just gotten off that van, said, “I’m going with you!”
As the driver drove us to the ER, the bystander kept handing me more tissues to soak up the chin-blood that was still spurting.
I thought, This is going to freak Sara out.
I also thought, as the driver kept driving and the bystander tended to me with concern, People can be so kind!
My periodic woozliness is something I’d been dealing with for decades. It was quite mysterious. I could do all sorts of vigorous exercise (like cycling 100 miles in one day) with no problem. But then — say, the next day — I’d be climbing a flight of stairs out of a BART station and get so unsteady that I’d have to stop a while and hang onto the bannister. Or I’d be walking briskly to a therapist appointment and have to stop repeatedly, as my chest tightened and I found it impossible to breathe freely. After a minute or so, the sensations would pass and I could continue my walk.
The weird thing was, from what the medical folks could determine, there was absolutely nothing wrong with me. I’d had umpteen tests done on my heart and lungs, and my brain had been multiply scanned (a process that I found strangely relaxing). I was super-healthy — Strong Like Bull. Except that I kept getting woozly.
Some of my cycling buddies suggested that I might be experiencing side effects from the atorvastatin I took for my high cholesterol. So with my doctor’s permission, at one point I took a month off of atorvastatin. My woozliness continued unabated — while my cholesterol shot through the roof. So I went back on that drug.
The only other medication I was on was Prozac, which I’d been taking — at first in short spurts, then eventually continuously — since my early 30s, when I began suffering from periodic depressions. Thinking back one day, I realized that my dizzy spells had started roughly when I began taking the Prozac. So I asked the psychiatrist at Kaiser if I could try taking a break from the medication. I wasn’t too worried about my mood: I hadn’t had a depression in over 15 years, since before our son had been born. The doctor said okay, and I tapered off the Prozac — and for the next year and a half, I experienced no woozliness; nor, to my great relief, did I get depressed. I thought, Wow — I’ve outgrown the need for an antidepressant! I was living au naturale, on atorvastatin and no other meds, just like the cavepeople of old!
But then, early last year, I finally did get depressed again — so deeply that I went back on the Prozac. And after a couple of months, as usual, I began glimmering back to my undepressed self. And I started getting woozly again.
But I wasn’t too worried. My woozliness was a minor inconvenience, but nothing terrible had ever happened — I’d just have to stand still for a while. And yet Sara worried that I’d eventually faint off of a BART platform somewhere.
And on June 27, 2024, just after getting off that Kaiser shuttle van, I did finally faint — I mean, experience a syncope. Not off of a BART platform, but outside a BART station.
The ER doctor looked at my bloody chin and told me she’d be able to glue it back together. I thought, Wow — they can fix you with glue now! Soon they’ll be doing circumcisions with Velcro. As she moved around me, I realized that I could hear her well on one side but only in a muffled way on the other side. Which is when I realized, with a jolt, that I had lost one of my hearing aids. It must have happened when I fell. This really bummed me out, as hearing aids are incredibly expensive. So I started thinking about stopping outside the MacArthur BART station on my way back home, on the off-chance that the hearing aid was still there on the sidewalk.
I realized that I hadn’t called Sara to let her know what happened. She’d been expecting me home hours earlier.
I called Sara and told her about my fainting spell, assuring her that I was okay. Looking to be cheered up a bit after this somewhat unsettling experience, I asked her, “So how’s the debate going between Biden and Trump?”
At the other end of the line, Sara gave a long, sad sigh.
I asked the Lyft driver, Cliff, if he could stop outside the MacArthur BART station on our way back to my place in Berkeley.
“Sure!” he said. I explained that I’d possibly lost one of my hearing aids there.
“Oh, so you’re hard of hearing?” he said.
Yes — very, I told him, ever since a particular Violent Femmes concert at the Storyville club in Boston in 1983.
“I’m hard of hearing, too!” he boomed. “And my beautiful fiancée has been nearly deaf since she was a little girl.”
Clearly, this was a topic that excited him. He started telling me a bunch of stuff about his life.
“You know, Josh,” he said, “I can tell that my fiancée really loves me, because every time I go past her she lets me kiss her on the cheek, even though that makes her hearing aid squeal.”
“Oh,” I said, “so she appreciates your feedback.”
He laughed. “Oh, you are a clever one, Josh!” he said. “You’d do really well in prison.”
This was where he kind of lost me.
He explained that he and his fiancée had both served time in a federal penitentiary. I started picturing a whole subculture of hard-of-hearing criminals who kept getting caught because they couldn’t hear the police sirens approaching.
Cliff’s good humor was cheering me up. I started feeling a little hopeful about actually finding my missing hearing aid.
As he approached the curb outside the MacArthur BART, I said, “Tell you what, Cliff: If I find my hearing aid, I will finally accept that there is a loving God.”
“Wow!” he said, chuckling. “High stakes!”
It was now quite dark outside the BART station, and there were very few commuters around.
I walked up to a nearby sign pole and squinted down at its base: no hearing aid!
But then I saw that there was another sign pole a few feet away. I ambled over to it — and there, at its base, was a big dried pool of blood: my chin-blood! And at the edge of the blood pool was … my missing hearing aid! And it still worked!!
“So there is a God!” Cliff boomed as I got back in his car. “Can’t wait to tell my fiancée! She kind of lost her faith when she was in prison.”
Back at home, Sara tended to me as I recuperated on the couch. My chin was still very sore.
The next day I called my Kaiser psychiatrist and told him that I really, truly had to stop taking the Prozac again: it was becoming dangerous to me. He agreed, and again supervised my tapering-off of the drug.
But in December, depression again clamped down on me.
By this time, the unthinkable had happened — and Donald Fucking Trump had been re-elected. So now everyone was kind of depressed — under the constant stress of horrible people in power constantly doing awful things. Several of you readers, in comments and emails to me, used the same term, saying you were feeling “situationally depressed.”
This new depression of mine lasted for over seven months — long after I’d gotten back on the Prozac. I wrote, in this space, about how I was realizing that I was getting a lot of the same messages from my depression that we were all getting from the MAGA thugs: You’re helpless. Things are hopeless. Give up!
But, inspired by Sara’s activism and the love and kindness of friends and family members, along with you wonderful readers, I finally emerged from that depression — though, tragically, the fascism continues.
I hope you don’t think it trite that I’ve come to consider this political period as resulting from a kind of syncope in our democracy. Citizens United, and a huge increase in income inequality, and countless other developments had cut off the people’s supply of power to our government. Our democracy is woozly.
But the people are fighting back — I can’t wait to hand out Sara’s wonderful patches at one of the “No Kings II” demonstrations on Oct. 18, which I hope will be absolutely huge. I’ve taken comfort from the 3.5 percent rule formulated by Harvard scholar Erica Chenoweth and others: that when 3.5 percent of a population protests nonviolently against a country’s authoritarian regime, that regime falls. I am buoyed by my fellow protesters at the demonstrations that Sara and I attend as often as we can — as well as by the countless brave acts of resistance carried out by the majority of my fellow citizens who refuse to bend the knee to fascism.
Woozly though I still may get from time to time, I will keep putting my 66-year-old shoulder to the wheel.
Despite what we keep getting from our MAGA rulers, people can be incredibly kind — like that van driver and the concerned bystander with the Kleenexes. Most of us love people, in all their miraculous diversity.
Dear readers, I believe we will win.
See you in the streets.
Performance note: My series of improvs toward a new solo show, titled What Is To Be Done?: Fighting Fascism and Depression, has been extended for a second time at The Marsh in Berkeley, through Oct. 10. Tix & info here. Nice review here.
Keeping our spirits up
Happy New Year to you
🤎Thank you, Josh, thank you.