Drowning in Post-Meal Collapses

Every time I ate, I lost consciousness.

But not in the typical sense.

I wasn't completely unconscious. Some part of me remained aware, but I lost my ability to consciously engage with the world around me.

I couldn't move freely. I couldn't process the sensory information coming from my environment. I couldn't pull myself back into the present, no matter how desperately I wanted to.

It was as though my consciousness had withdrawn from the outside world, leaving me trapped somewhere deep within my own body.

It felt like drowning. Everything started to go black. My world turned inside-out, my body incapable of navigating external sensory input, fully turning inwards towards my own unconscious.

It felt like falling. Slipping into a dark abyss with nothing to grasp or hold onto, no grounded stability or rooted calm. My world fell away, like doing somersaults in a landslide.

I knew it would happen. Like clockwork. Shortly after eating a filling meal, I'd go lay down, preparing for the inevitable.

For some reason, digestion was over-coupled or deeply entwined with the fold stress response in my nervous system from childhood s*xual abuse at 4 years old.

So after eating, my body relived those sensations of trauma.

My nervous system collapsed, just like a possum playing dead to save its own life.

My heart rate slowed. Not in a healthy, calm, relaxed way. More like "I'm faking death to survive" kind of way. Bradycardia kicked in.

Along with the slowed heart rate, my muscles went limp. Collapsed immobility and hypotonia, resulting in overwhelming fatigue that limited thought, movement, and action.

My oxygen levels dropped to dangerously low levels. While 98-100% is normal and healthy, mine dropped to 85-93%, and I felt it in my entire being.

"In some forms of physiological collapse, a sudden drop in heart rate and blood pressure reduces the supply of blood to the brain. This can produce visual darkening, weakness, altered awareness, and sometimes fainting."

[[TO BE CONTINUED]]

This continued daily from ages 25-27.

Even now, at age 33, years after I "completed my healing", I still experience some residual sensations. After a large meal, especially midday, my energy completely collapses. It can be immobilizing at times. I have schedules and tools to navigate it, but it still feels awful and can be extremely inconvenient!