Daddio: Another Weekend, Another Medical Emergency

Saturday morning, after getting a bit of yard work done, Jen was sitting on the couch drinking some water when she started getting extremely dizzy, lightheaded and nauseous and almost passed out a handful of times.  Thinking she was dehydrated from being outside, I made her drink a bunch of water, but that wasn't helping.  The fainting spells came and went in waves, so when it seemed to pass for a bit, I got Nana to watch the kids and drove Jen to urgent care.  By the time we got there it mostly passed.  She had a small wave of dizziness while the nurse was examining her, but that was it.

They immediately checked her fluids and found that she wasn't dehydrated, so they checked her heart and she hadn't had a heart attack.  They ran some blood work and it came back clean-- for all intents and purposes she was completely healthy except that she was having these fainting spells.  They figured it was a virus that was making her nauseous and every time it hit her, it dropped her blood pressure.  Jen has low blood pressure normally, so when it dropped it, it made her lightheaded.

So we went home with some anti-nausea medicine and Jen stayed in bed for the rest of the weekend.  She feels perfectly fine now and everything is okay.

Here's the really weird part.  This morning she just remembered that about an hour before the fainting spells first hit, she had been picking weeds out of the cactus garden with her bare hands.  She picked one that pricked her entire right hand with sharp thorns and it made her whole hand numb for about five minutes.  Less than an hour later is when all the craziness started.

The moral of the story: wear gloves when doing yard work.