![]() ![]() Ledereich realized that although it looked like syncope, it wasn’t she hadn’t actually lost consciousness. ![]() Her sudden collapse looked as if a switch had been thrown and all her muscles just turned off. “I know what you’ve got!” he told her excitedly. Ledereich watched as the patient calmly sat up. “Don’t call 911,” the patient called out. Meanwhile, when her son needed to see an E.N.T., she took him to Ledereich - and now she lay motionless on the floor. He would get her records and then have her return. She felt a little tired and had a little asthma, but other than these strange, repetitive spells, she was fine. Like the doctors before him, he found nothing. But he listened to her story and examined her. At that first encounter, Ledereich was not optimistic. She thought she might have an inner-ear problem, and he had been recommended by several friends. That’s when she scheduled the appointment with Dr. A neurologist in New York carefully examined her and her now-thick chart and pronounced definitively that there was nothing wrong with her and that she should try to relax and maybe take up yoga. But a normal electroencephalogram (EEG) suggested otherwise. One thought that these spells might be seizures rather than syncope. Her internist was as baffled as the doctors she’d seen in the hospital. When she awoke, she called her husband, who took her directly to her doctor’s office. She went home hoping that whatever caused the two episodes had simply gone away.īut the next day she was driving to work and began to feel that now-familiar flutter in her stomach. A test is successful when the patient passes out and the monitors capture the cause. The patient was hooked up to blood-pressure and cardiac monitors, strapped to a table positioned almost vertically and watched for up to an hour. And so, before the patient left the hospital, she had a tilt-table test - a study designed to provoke a fainting spell. ![]() The best way to distinguish among these nonfatal varieties is to witness an attack. If a normal rhythm isn’t restored in time, you may never wake up.įar more often syncope is triggered by dehydration or other causes of sudden low blood pressure. When a heart beats too rapidly, too slowly or too erratically to deliver enough blood to the brain, you faint. The trick for doctors is to identify those cases that are neither. Most of the time the cause is benign and transient. Up to half of the population will faint at least once in their lifetimes. Syncope - the medical term for fainting - is common. She had a head CT scan and lots of blood tests. ![]() She spent two nights in the cardiac-care unit as doctors looked for any of the irregular heart rhythms that could start as a fainting spell but might end in death. Eventually, her husband persuaded her to go to the hospital. Was she going to faint again? She was almost at the door when she collapsed. At the coffee hour following the service she started to feel that fluttery sensation in her stomach. She didn’t want to go to the hospital, she told her husband. She could hear him calling her name, but she couldn’t answer him she couldn’t even open her eyes.Īnd then, just as quickly as it started, it was over. That day she had just put on her shoes to go to a bar mitzvah, and as she straightened up she felt a fluttering sensation in her stomach. She was 49, a nurse, and she considered herself pretty healthy until one Saturday nearly three months earlier. She had been having these spells almost daily for the past several months, she told him at their first appointment. Ledereich was describing various treatment alternatives when the woman pitched to the floor. Despite that, she took her son to see him for the treatment of a chronic sinus infection. Ledereich hadn’t been able to figure it out, either. She was fainting several times a day, and no one knew why. Ledereich, an ear, nose and throat specialist in Clifton, N.J., first met the mother a couple of weeks before, when she herself came in as a patient. Was the fainting brought on simply by stress? Or could there be an underlying neurological problem? ![]()
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