Logan's Weblog: Fainting Reflex

From my Uncle Dave in Colorado:

July 10, 2007
Cases
Saving a Child, Scaring a Parent: A Fainting Reflex
By JORDANA HORN
My 3-year-old son Zev sat up in his hospital bed, eyes open wide. He could not get over the fact that he was being allowed to eat as many Oreos as he liked and watch “Blue’s Clues” in bed. I could not get over the fact that contrary to what I had thought a mere two hours earlier, he was not dead.

The day had started out typically enough. When Zev, his younger brother and I arrived at Wednesday morning gym class, a bit late, the kids were already running on an inflated track, a sort of elongated, roofless moon bounce. When they got to the end, they jumped off the track, landing about one foot down on a foam block. Needing no excuse to run, Zev took off like a freight train and threw himself onto the track.

Suddenly, he started to cry. Jumping off the track, he had overshot and struck his rear end on the foam cube before landing on the floor on his feet.

I went to comfort him, sure he would bounce back, as it were. After all, it had been a short fall, and the cube was just foam. It might have startled him, but it couldn’t have hurt him badly.

But his sobs escalated, and his breathing grew jagged. I tried to calm him down, but to no avail. This was unusual. Zev is normally an easygoing child; tantrums are rare. His upset was disturbing, but not as disturbing as what followed.

In my embrace, without any warning, he went limp. I tilted myself back to look at him. His eyes had rolled back into his head. His face was covered with a sheen of sweat and had gone from pink to whitish-gray. I heard something loud, horrible and relentless in the background. It took me a minute to realize that it was me, screaming.

I have never had a near-death experience. But holding my limp child up by the armpits, begging someone to call an ambulance, as the rest of the class watched — my younger child included, his hand being held by the instructor — came as close as I ever want to get. I felt as if my whole life was there in my son’s pale face. Please, please, please be alive.

Another mother came over and massaged Zev’s jawbones. I had no idea what this was supposed to do, but it seemed better than doing nothing. Just as an ambulance pulled up to the building with sirens screaming, Zev opened his eyes. His pallor faded slowly. He looked exhausted. His hair was wet from sweat. My face was wet with tears. He had been “out” for the longest minute and a half of my life.

“I’m tired,” he said, and tried to lean into me. I held him up.

“Who am I?” I asked.

“Mommy,” he said, in the weary tone of someone who’s been on the witness stand too long.

After a 10-minute ambulance ride that seemed much longer, trying to keep Zev awake by reciting “Where the Wild Things Are” from memory, we got to the emergency room. By the time the doctor saw us, Zev seemed a little sluggish, but fine. He was responsive. It was as if I had dreamed the entire scenario: he had no memory of it.

The shocking jolt of hitting the foam — not even enough to cause a bruise — was enough of a surprise to cause a condition called breath holding. Zev’s sobbing, the doctor explained, had made his chest wall expand until the pressure had compressed his vena cava and restricted the blood flow to his heart — and therefore to the brain. This set off a protective fainting reflex.

Breath-holding episodes like this always stop spontaneously; there is nothing to do but wait them out. I had never heard of the phenomenon before. But the doctor assured me that it was not unheard of, and that the most harm done by a breath-holding episode was to the parent having to witness it. I concurred with that diagnosis.

A child has this reflex only until age 5, so I have just two more years of potential scares ahead of me. Apparently, according to my Internet research, if you want to test whether or not your children have the reflex, you can trigger it by pressing on both of their eyeballs. I don’t recommend it.

Jordana Horn is a lawyer and a writer in Short Hills, N.J.