Weird week at the Fringe after frightening full-on heart seizure - Vladimir McTavish


I had a totally unexpected fainting episode on Tuesday morning. At first my wife thought I was messing about. When it happened a second time, she was so frightened she called an ambulance, as she realised what was actually going on. I may have studied drama as a student, but mimicking a full-on seizure was one thing I was never taught how to do. Especially not at nine o’clock in the morning.
All the time, I assumed she was over-reacting because she’s been binge-watching box sets of House all week. Anyway, she called an ambulance. When the paramedics arrived, they discovered my heart rate had dropped to well below 30. Which is, apparently, very low.
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Hide AdOnce the ambulance set off, my condition improved considerably. By the time we reached the ERI, my heart rate and blood pressure were normal. But by then it was too late to turn back and I spent the next 24 hours in A&E wired up to a heart monitor, before being transferred to the cardiology ward. All the time, my heart rate and blood pressure remained fine, which totally baffled the medics.
Not only were they unable to find anything wrong with me, they couldn’t work out why the episodes had happened in the first place. I have a sneaking suspicion they may have been triggered by me doing two hour-long shows back-to-back after going out running on the hottest day of the year, and not re-hydrating properly.
I was finally back on stage last night, and all my weekend gigs are going ahead. But it’s been a weird couple of days, sitting in a hospital bed with the mayhem of the Fringe carrying on a few miles away. While my fellow comedians were gigging late into the evening, and staying up into the wee small hours, I was lying in bed in a room where they turned the lights off at 10pm.
I had never spent a night in hospital before. The experience reminded me of my late-night long-haul flight back from Australia in March. Somebody else decides what time the lights go off, you’re plunged into darkness for hours on end and are served very bland food at weird times of day.
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Hide AdThere are positives to the story. Firstly, the care I received from the wonderful NHS staff was first class. Secondly, I have never had three such relaxing days in my entire Fringe career, all booze-free.
Thirdly, because my case was obviously not an emergency, Megan the paramedic who was driving didn’t bother turning on the blues-and-twos so it took ages to crawl through heavy traffic to get to the ERI.
That gave me plenty of time to have a really good chat with her colleague Matt in the back of the ambulance. In fact, the journey took so long he had time to look up the details of my Fringe show on his phone, and he ended up buying two tickets for Monday night. That’s the most bizarre marketing strategy I’ve ever employed, and one I won’t be repeating in future.