Still no profound ideas to explore tonight. I must be going through a shallow phase.

I will enjoy it while I can.

Something happened last week that I have yet to inscribe here. I decided, somewhat arbitrarily, that I would wear my jacket to school so that I would not be cold in the morning when I left. I decided this despite how many times that has turned out to be a bad, bad, BAD idea.

Well, when I did it on that recent day (maybe last Monday?), it was an even worse idea than usual by a factor of ten.

Usually, I am just a tad too warm coming home. Not wonderful, but usually not life-threatening. But this time… I am fairly certain I had a brush with death. See, I am very prone to heat stroke. It’s a weakness handed down to me from my father and he got it from his mother. So it’s kind of a legacy.

And I was already in a bad way when I reached the Skytrain station downtown. I was sweating like a block of ice melting in the desert, and I had that funny feeling in my head that should have been a very clear warning sign that I should remedy the situation pronto.

But sensible judgment is the first thing to go in these situations. It quickly get replaced by what appears to be my default mode, which is bloody-minded determination. Whatever it was that I was intended to do when I lost my rational faculties becomes my mission and I will pursue that mission with an almost robotic level of determination. Like this is now my Prime Objective.

This time, my Prime Directive was to get home.

And that’s how I felt before I got on the Skytrain.

So there I am, stupidly sitting there in my heavy black leather coat, sweating bucket, unable to read my book because the sweat would have soaked it in seconds (and also because I was barely literate in that frame of mind), when the worst possible thing happened.

I stopped sweating.

And let me tell you, that is a very, very bad thing to happen because suddenly my body wasn’t cooling itself at all. My temperature started to skyrocket, huge angry black spots appeared in my vision, I became extremely faint and somewhat nauseous, I could hear a sound like a million bees humming loudly at a pitch so low it was barely audible, and oh yeah, every cell in my body was screaming in pain.

Thank goodness some tiny shred of my mind remained active and alert enough to tell my body to take my coat partially off. I don’t remember doing it. But I was coatless when I came back to something approaching a rational state. This gave me an excellent opportunity to contemplate what a fucking idiot I am.

In my defense, I was wearing the jacket because I had already left it behind twice when I had taken it off then forgot to put it back on again.

But that was still pretty fucking stupid.

After I got off the Skytrain, I found a place to sit down where there was a bit of a breeze, then took the jacket all the way off and sat there as I cooled off and came to and in general come back to life. The cool air felt quite lovely, but it was still very unpleasant to endure.

Trying to walk home before cooling off completely would have been insane, though. I mean, there’s stupid and then there’s STUPID. When I got off that Skytrain, I was in a very bad frame of mind and an even worse frame of body. I came close to fainting on the escalator. Dunno what I looked like but I am betting it was not pretty.

After I was more or less certified for walking, I CARRIED my coat home, sat in front of the computer not doing much except drinking water until the adrenaline wore off some more and I could lay down with my fan pointed directly at my forehead and, eventually, sleep very deeply for about an hour.

I don’t know exactly what makes me heat stroke prone. It definitely feels like something swells up in my head and that puts pressure on a vein or maybe a nerve, and that it what makes me so ill. And as this incident illustrates, it can escalate quite rapidly, and it makes it very hard to make the rational decisions that are needed in order to extricate myself from the situation. That makes it feel like my rationality gets stolen away from me and I end up in a very bad frame of mind before I have a chance to react to the changing conditions.

And it’s potentially life threatening. Like I said, I feel like I had a brush with death. I don’t know what would have happened on that Skytrain if I had not managed to get my jacket wide open and partially off my shoulders. At minimum, I would have passed out, and then it would have been in the hands of fate whether someone noticed and knew what to do or at least called 911. I might have ended up in the hospital and if they didn’t grok that I needed cooling down, I might have ended up with brain damage or worse.

It’s a sobering (and scary) thought and a powerful reminder that I have to be fairly careful if I am to make it through this thing called life. I am not exactly in rugged good health. It would be more accurate to say I am in stable poor health. I can make it through my life but there are a lot of perils that I have to keep in mind if I want to stay and play instead of getting sidelined by illness.

My life might seem placid but I am not a well man and it would behoove me to remember that.

To sum up : being me is hard.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.