A Rush of Blood to the Head

If you have been following our life here in Wewa you may remember that in November Addie and I both had a few days of feeling under the weather. Runny noses, coughs, and aches and pains took over for about a week but we made it through our first sickness together.

On one of those ill-feeling mornings something funny happened. Funny in the way that when I thought about it later and when Sabian and I recounted the events of that morning, we chuckled at the thought of what happened. As I attempt to tell the story I anticipate that it will not come across as funny as it really was, but I hope somehow you'll find some humor in it.

I mentioned in that November post that I was feeling a little lightheaded. Every now and again I will feel this way with no consequence, and until those few days of being sick it had been quite a while since I'd really felt like I could faint.

One of those mornings started like any other. I heard Addie stirring and when she'd had sufficient time to talk to herself and I knew she was ready for one of us to rescue her from the confines of her crib, I got up to answer her call.

The first order of business was to change her diaper. I almost made it through the diaper change when I could feel the familiar hot flash and the woozy, head-floating-above-my-shoulders feeling start to take over.

Here's what followed:

Me: "Sabian! Sabian! Come in here!"

(Sabian stumbles in, groggy from sleeping.)

Me: "I think I'm going to faint."

(Sabian takes over with Addie.)

I remember making it to the doorway of Addie's room and then everything went black.

CRASH.

This is what I remember next:

Sabian: "Melissa? Melissa? Honey, are you okay?"

Me: Laughing

As I slowly came to, before I even opened my eyes I knew exactly what had happened.

I had, in fact, fainted, and as I woke up I realized just where I had landed:

I was in my suitcase.

We had been on an overnight trip with some of our youth kids when Addie and I got sick and I had not had the chance to get everything put away before the aches and pains took over. My suitcase was still sitting, mouth open, on the floor by the doorway in our bedroom.

Apart from landing in my suitcase there are a couple of other nutty things attached to this story. To get into our bedroom from Addie's you simply take a hard left. Our doorways corner up at the end of the hall, so you just turn directly into one room from the other. My suitcase was on the floor in our bedroom, right next to the doorway, and it would have been on my right when I stumbled into our room. At that point I was already out, but somehow I made it into our room and stumbled far enough into the room that then I fell neatly backwards into the suitcase, rather than forward.

Right next to my suitcase (you can see it in the photo) is a wooden, antique trunk Sabian gave me as a gift for my birthday one year when we were dating. It is big and heavy, yet I missed it on my way down. I sure would have known if I'd hit it.

Instead, I woke up, laughing, and went on about my day.

Even in writing this post we have had a few more laughs about this incident. It was all a little bizarre and funny at the same time.

I am thankful we can look back on this and laugh about it and other kooky things that happen.

Disclaimer: the photos above depict a reenactment of my fainting spell rather than the actual event.