What could this be?!
Question:
What could this be?
Ok, I was in church with my mother and father today and it was near the end where everyone held hands, i held hands with my mother and a ladie beside me. Right when i joins both hands i felt un-describable. Black started coming from all sides of me and i felt as if i was goign to sortof fall. then i just tried to stoped it and i regained control. nothing happened tho. but my heart was beating fast and i would like to know what this is/what could i have done this.
p.s. i did not eat that morning and i drank a nice size cup of cofee.
Answers:
The reason you had the symptoms you describe is that you were about to faint.
The medical wording is a vaso-vagal reflex, or vagal reflex. But in your case, the vagus nerve probably didn't have any contribution.
When you start to stand up or sit up from laying down, or stand up from sitting,your autonomic nervous system tells your heart that you are going to need more blood pressure to maintain normal blood pressure in your head. If you satnd up too fast, then your system didn't have time to react, and you lost pressure for a short time. When your brain picked up on this, it tried to correct by speeding up your heart, increasing your blood pressure, etc. This is the sympathetic response.
There are two sides of the autonomic nervous system, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. The sympathetic maintains blood pressure by increasing the tone to the little arteries just in front of the capillaries which have muscles. These are the precapillary arterioles.
The sympathetic system also increases heart rate. It uses adrenalin or epinephrine as a neurotransmitter.
The parasympathetic system is used mainly for the gut. It speeds up the gut so that digestion works your intestines move, stomach moves, etc.. It also slows down the heart, lowers blood pressure, etc. The main nerve is the Vagus nerve.
If you have a vagal reaction, your heart will slow down, you'll lose blood pressure and you can faint.
The symptoms you describe are related to getting up just a bit too fast so you didn't have enough time to increase the sympathetic tone to your blood vessels thus maintain cerebral blood flow. So you nearly fainted.