Well I won’t be forgetting this last birthday in a hurry! My girlfriend got a last-minute deal to end all deals on a pair of tickets to fly to Paris for the day. So as a surprise she took me off to Paris for lunch!

We arrived shortly before 11am after a short hop from Liverpool John Lennon airport. The flight on the way over curiously made me feel a little odd, but once we landed all was fine and we jumped on the metro and headed over the Eiffel Tower where we were doing to jump on a dinner cruise boat that takes to on a slow tour up the River Seine and back over the course of two hours.

It was, as you’d imagine, very enjoyable. The weather let us down a little, but for the cruise, it didn’t rain which was good. It was just super cool to be in Paris for lunch. We had frogs legs for starter (of course), which taste almost exactly like chicken, then I had the duckling for the main course followed by an assortment of French cheeses and red wine. It really was wonderful.

After the cruise we walked around for a while, went up to the first level of the Eiffel Tower and generally hung out. One of the great things about living in the UK is that you really are very close to places like Paris, Berlin, Brussles, Rome, etc so day trips there are actually very common. In fact, the last time I was in Paris I drove there for the day with a couple of buddies!

Anyway, as we flew back in the evening all was well until for some reason the plane made a sudden descent. Very quickly I felt pretty bad again, but this time it wasn’t going away, instead, I started to feel very wrong very quickly.

I decided to try and concentrate on something else but things soon became quite bad. Pretty quickly I had that ‘pins a needles’ feeling in both my hands and I was no longer able to move my legs, plus I was now sweating so much that sweat was dripping off my eyebrows! I then threw up into the bag which was both distressing and just plain old embarrassing. I fly so much I couldn’t understand how or what this was happening to me.

Crucially, through consideration for my fellow passengers, I made one critical mistake, I locked the bag over my nose and mouth so as to eliminate the smell for others as I know it’s not at all pleasant. However by doing this I should have realized that I was dramatically restricting the amount of oxygen I was getting. I was therefore breathing less and less oxygen with every breath and began to fade out. Moments later I lost consciousness at which point I am told the pilot requested a priority landing at Liverpool and a rescue crew to meet us.

Once on the ground we were met by a fire crew who came aboard and gave me oxygen for a while. I was drenched in sweat and so they took off a couple of layers, at which point, I’m told, I started to shake a lot. Paramedics arrived shortly after and I was taken off the empty plane in some kind of special lift, though I can’t really tell you anything about that because I was pretty much out of it.

I was taken to the Royal hospital and sat in the ER with a few weirdo’s for a while before being taken for tests. All I wanted to do was drink some water and lie still for a while, but they kept moving me around and even made me walk at one point, which just put me back to square one again.

The Dr said blood test revealed I was fighting “some kind of infection” so he ordered more test and put me on IV fluids. A while later he said that tests were inconclusive so maybe I should go home and see how I progress from there.

This has happened a few times before. Last time was when I was diving in choppy waters off Long Beach, Los Angeles. I collapsed and had to be pulled out of the water by my fellow divers. It was all very dramatic and they have teased me about it at every opportunity since. The time before that was when I was in a two seater plane over Mt Ascutnee in New Hampshire. Shortly after the flight I collapsed and as if that wasn’t dramatic enough I stopped breathing twice while unconscious!

I think I am now going to make an appointment to see a Dr about this. There seems to be no real reason for each of these incidents, and each time they happen I seem absolutely powerless to stop them from happening which is both a real drag and really distressing at the time for me and those I’m with.

On reflection I can see a number of things that may have caused me to be so ill. The day before I had had the most traumatic stage of the dental surgery to this point. It was the session where the dentist was digging out the fragments of shattered root from my gum. I was under a local anesthetic of course, so for me it was entirely painless, but as my nose was numb from the anesthetic I am wondering if that caused a mild imbalance in my inner ear which was then aggravated by the dramatic decent of the plane?

Also, my body was probably slightly weekend from that surgery maybe? I’d also not drank anything after the cruise, and although I wasn’t drunk, I had polished off nearly three quarter of a bottle of red wine over lunch, so I was probably dehydrated.

All in all it was a dramatic way to end my actual birthday. But at the weekend my folks and a few friends are coming up for a nice evening meal out. That will be a nice and less dramatic way to spend my birthday I’m sure. I’m going to just take it easy for today too so I’ll be tip-top for tomorrow.