In February 1992 I went to see the free dentist that was attached to the side of the Lyell McEwin hospital in Elizabeth. I explained to the dentist that I didn't want any fancy mucking around, just pull the tooth out.
The dentist injected a local anaesthetic next to the tooth then said "While we're waiting for that to go numb come in to the next room and I'll take an X-ray so I can make sure there's no complications." No worries, I got up and walked into the next room, also with a dental chair and an X-ray machine. As I walked into that room I suddenly felt very ill and very dizzy, the dentist noticed and asked if I was alright.
When I woke up I was staring at the ceiling. I thought I was home in my own bed, I'd just had a wonderful sleep, the best sleep I'd ever had in my life. For the first time that I could remember there was absolutely no pain in my body anywhere, what a wonderful way to wake up, what a wonderful day. Then the ceiling caught my attention, it was white and I was pretty sure that the ceiling in my bedroom was yellow.
Then a man in a white lab coat leaned forward in to my field of vision. I couldn't understand what he was doing in my bedroom, he was talking at a million miles an hour and I couldn't understand a word he was saying, but he seemed very concerned about me, he was a very nice man. Then my memory began to return and the man's voice started to make sense, he told me that I had a fit and asked if there was any history of epilepsy in my family. No. He told me that I had been clinically dead for a minute and seventeen seconds, he'd been performing CPR on me while waiting for help to arrive.
Two large orderlies from the hospital arrived then with a gurney. The gurney didn't fit through the door so they picked me up and carried me out and laid me on the gurney then wheeled me through in to the hospital. Three nurses started fussing over me fitting sensors for an ECG machine. By this time my wits and memory had fully returned, one of the nurses started trying to put a drip in my wrist. "Sorry sweetheart but I'm not letting you do that, the last time I let someone stick a needle in me is how I ended up on this gurney in a hospital." She said that she had to, it was standard procedure. I told her more firmly that it wouldn't be happening this time.
They kept me there for an hour under observation. When they finally agreed there was nothing wrong with me and released me I marched straight back to the dentist and asked if he'd please pull the tooth out now. He said he'd need to give me another needle. "Absolutely not! Not after that last one, anyway, it's still numb." I lied. He pulled the tooth for me, I think I did a pretty good job of pretending that it didn't hurt. For several hours after this I still felt that strange euphoria that I'd woken up with, and there was still no pain in my back or my ruined knee.
A week later I went back to the hospital for a talk with their chief neurosurgeon about what had happened to me. He told me that what happened to me was called a Neural Seizure, that means my brain shut down. That's why the dentist had asked if I had epilepsy, my body spasmed for a while exactly the same as it would have if you'd chopped my head off. He said that when a brain shuts down like that there is nothing that medical science can do about it. He said sometimes the brain will just switch itself back on again like mine did, and sometimes it doesn't.
What triggered the seizure was Adrenaline. They put it in all anaesthetics these days for people with heart problems and high blood pressure. No one is allergic to Adrenaline itself, if they were their own bodies would kill them during birth. The problem is the preservative that they put in the Adrenaline, it's called Sodium Meta-bisulphate. People that brew their own beer know this chemical as bottle steriliser, and commercial fishermen use it as a steriliser for their catch before they freeze it. It's fine if I ingest it, but just a few micrograms in my blood will kill me. One in ten thousand Australians suffer this allergy according to our government, that's roughly 2300 of us. I don't like dentists any more.
