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by Aditha Dissanayake

It must have been due to dehydration says the doctor, when I tell him I had fainted at the bus halt.

With the outdoor temperature at 31.6 degrees Celsius, having walked in the mid afternoon heat for far too long, and not having had a gulp of water since morning, I would have harboured the right conditions for "sin-ko-pea" (written as syncope). All of a sudden nothing had seemed right as I had waited for a bus with vacant seats on Baseline Road. The pavement had begun to sway two and fro, my legs had started to fold beneath me. When I open my eyes again I see two men peering down at me from an immense height. Their heads are unusually large for their bodies. Then I realize they look out of proportion because I am lying flat on the ground in between the pavement and the grass edge by the side of the road. I had fainted, for the first, and I hope, the last time in my life.

Within seconds I am back on my feet, feeling ashamed and embarrassed and foolish. "Everything is O.K. I'm fine now" I assure the two men who had been bending over me. They look like retired government officers, well over seventy. They are uncertain how they can help me. Finally, one stoops and picks up my bag for me and waits with it till I brush the sand off my clothes.

I need not have been embarrassed. Even Fidel Castro had passed out on the podium sometime in June this year, when he was making, what the press had called a marathon speech to the Cuban nation. A lie-down and a whiff of oxygen had restored him to continue the speech. According to the Oxford Medical Companion, syncope, which is synonymous with faint, is a sudden temporary loss of consciousness due to transient cerebral anoxia. In other words, you faint when the right amount of oxygen fails to reach your brain. But when you fall to the ground, your head is automatically placed on the same level as your heart so that the blood rushes to the brain and recovery takes place within seconds. Two major causes for fainting are heat and airlessness. But, dehydration, low blood sugar and the sight of blood too can cause similar attacks. Usually an attack occurs when a person is standing or sitting upright. Yawning, perspiring, nausea, ringing in the ears and loss of strength are some of the tell-tale signs that you are just about to pass out. When you fall, however, you fall with sufficient control to prevent hurting yourself.

"It is dangerous to prevent a fainting person from lying down or raise a person who has fainted before full recovery has occurred", warn the medical dictionaries.

According to Prof. MC Petch, in the British Medical Journal: "People who faint need reassurance, and a few may experience continuing morbidity owing to the uncertainty about the next faint and its consequences".

Continuing morbidity? As long as the heat goes on, as long as the hearts of the rain gods refuse to melt, it is only natural that fears of temporary loss of consciousness due to dehydration, by the side of the road, in crowded buses, in the waiting areas of non-A/C buildings, too, would continue.

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