The surgical blackout
Updated On: 31 August, 2025 07:10 AM IST | Mumbai | Dr Mazda Turel
Fainting — the world going dark, your body abandoning you — can feel like the end, but in most cases, it’s just the body’s failsafe during overload; a reminder of our human frailty
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It’s never comforting when a school friend calls you and begins with, “Maz, I think I nearly died today.” With school friends, it’s easy to retort by saying, “Thank God you didn’t, because there’s no way I could have cancelled surgery or even OPD to make it for the funeral!”
He had slipped on the stairs, landed hard on his back, and the pain had been so intense that everything went black. For a few seconds, he fainted. When he arose from the ashes, he was convinced he had brushed past death. “It was like the lights went out,” he said. “One moment I was there, the next I was nowhere.” Pretty similar to how my daughter explains a Social Studies period at school.
For doctors, fainting is common. For patients, it is terrifying. It feels like the end. The body abandons you, the world disappears, and you have no control. If you’ve ever blacked out, you’ll know the fear: Was that my final moment? We call it syncope, a brief interruption of blood and oxygen to the brain. It sounds simple when written in a textbook. It doesn’t feel simple when you’re the one hitting the floor. Sometimes it happens to people when they pee, sometimes it even happens in the middle of sex. That’s why I find medicine both funny and tragic in simultaneity.
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