On the evening of December 27, my parents, grandmother, and I went to Cracker Barrel for dinner. During our meal, I began to experience periods of intense pain in my left elbow, often causing me to lean forward onto the table. Then, out at the car afterwards, I opened the rear hatch on my grandmother's Buick when she grasped the passenger door handle. The hatch door abruptly began to close, striking me in the head just above my right eyebrow on its way down. Immediately, I took the palm of my right hand to my forehead as enormous pain radiated throughout my entire body before, all of a sudden, it vanished. In an instant, the pain had disappeared, everything had gone black, and the refreshing scent of the fresh rain had faded. For just a moment, it was as if I were inside a pitch-black room.
From my mother's account, as soon as the hatch struck my head, I was frozen in place, "eyes open, but gone." She feared I would collapse, so she and my father shuffled me to the car. I dropped across the length of the backseat for a few minutes before, apparently, pulling myself up enough for her to climb into the backseat with me. For the entirety of the ride home, she held me as I leaned into her. On the way, however, I began to experience what she described as "seizure-like episodes," where my entire body would stiffen as I pushed myself into the back of the seat and her, looking upward as I gagged. Each of these episodes lasted under a minute before I relaxed, and, according to her, I had a few before we finally made it home.
Once we arrived back home, my father helped my grandmother into the house before coming back outside to help me. Inside, my grandmother offered an ice pack from upstairs, and my parents helped me downstairs to the basement. They sat me on the corner of her basement couch, and, gradually, I regained my senses. For the rest of the evening, I continued to experience my elbow pain, as well as a migraine, among some of my other usual POTS symptoms. My mother accompanied me for the rest of the night as we rested and watched television. Meanwhile, my father kept my grandmother company upstairs, who is recovering from an emergency hip surgery after a slip-and-fall while trying to put up Christmas decorations.
A month later, I don't have any recollection of any of the events that night beyond the impact with the hatch and until we got settled in my grandmother's basement living space, except for a few select, fuzzy memories. The first memory, just a quote, was from a voice that I had never heard before: "Do you guys need any help?" I asked my mother about it afterward, and she said it came from a lovely gentleman in the parking lot who offered to help get me into the car, but by then I was already at the back door, so they politely declined and thanked him. Second, I faintly remember two events from the car: first, the view out the backseat window of tall city buildings, and second, the frightened look on my grandmother's face as she tried to peer over her shoulder into the backseat. My third memory is another quote, this time from my mother: "Wait for your Dad to come back," which she explained came from when my father was helping my grandmother inside, and I tried to sit up in the backseat of the car. Lastly, I remember the distinct sound of rain pouring onto the top of the large, grand awning covering the walkway from my grandmother's driveway to the front door.
I would go on to experience another one of these episodes in the New Year, after we returned home from our Christmas trip to my grandmother's. The most concerning part of these new episodes to me is that I have little memory of the event afterward. This is unlike any POTS episode I have experienced previously. I imagine that my mother would say the seizure-like activity scares her most, but I can't stop worrying about my lack of memory after these two episodes.