I’ve passed out twice in my entire life. Once when I was in middle school while I was taking a tour in Colonial Williamsburg, the second time while I was at work. The first time wasn’t all the remarkable, aside from scaring the crap out of me. The other time? Well…
It was my first day of work at a nice clothing store (data point: we sold eighty dollar dresses), and I was feeling pretty good about how things were going. I was ringing up a customer while my manager supervised when I started feeling queasy. A little light headed. I tried to plow through when my vision started going gray around the edges. Oh, hell, I’m about to pass out, I thought and attempted to excuse myself from the customer. I staggered two steps away from the registers when I completely lost consciousness. Now, in my fantasy world, what happened next looked something like this:
More like a lady-like swoon rather than passing out.
Instead, reality being the cruel mistress that she is, I looked more like this:
A fainting goat. I swear he's not dead.
Yeah. My last conscious thought was hearing the customer sneer out, “What’s wrong with her?” What followed is someone hauling me into the back office, a cupcake magically appearing before me and a complete stranger driving me home. I’m still baffled as to where that cupcake came from, to be honest. Apparently I had hit my head pretty hard when I collapsed like a bag of bricks and spent the rest of the evening paranoid I had a concussion, convinced I was going to die if I fell asleep.
Good times, good times.
