How One Story Flattened My Father

I once made my dad faint.

It was in the middle of a busy restaurant in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and he went down like a felled tree.

I'd been telling him a story about the birth of my son just a few weeks before. We were eating lunch, the baby that had been the source of the emergency sleeping peacefully in a carrier in the booth beside me. It was a dramatic story, but not graphic — about being rushed to the O.R. on a gurney, about the fear that I was dying, and the surgeon who paused to put his hand on my forehead, promising, "We will never let you die."

As my dad cut into his rare steak, he was spellbound.
Or at least I thought he was.

Suddenly, my dad ordered me to stop.
"Okay, Susan, that's enough!"

"What's wrong?" my mother asked.

"I'm sick!" my father said. "I'm sick to my stomach."

A Dramatic Turn

We paid the bill, but as my father stepped down from our booth, he crumpled to the floor.
It may have been sheer embarrassment that had him clambering up my mother's leg to try and regain his bipedal stance. But he just couldn't hold it. He'd partially come to, try to regain complete consciousness, and then collapse again.

"Call 911!" I ordered the waitress.

By the time the paramedics arrived, my father was alert and sitting up — though still in an unlikely spot, right in the middle of the restaurant floor.

When they told him they would need to cut open his shirt to place electrodes on his chest — a further embarrassment — he refused.
But when they said they would otherwise have to take him to the E.R., he reluctantly agreed.

When it was all over, they pronounced my father's heart fine. Later, back home in Northern California, my dad looked into it further and learned he had likely experienced a "vasovagal response" to my story.

The Power of a Story

My dad was a consummate storyteller. He loved long, winding jokes and tall tales. So when my father fainted from my story, he was proud. nothing made him prouder than seeing that I had inherited the gift of storytelling. My dad didn’t just faint, he bragged to his friends, "Susan told me a story that made me pass out."

In fact, he turned the whole event of my story making him faint into another great story. Not just because it was funny, but because it affirmed something important: Words have force. Storytelling is an act of agency — when we shape an experience into narrative, we reclaim it, own it, and share it with authority. Maybe not every story makes someone faint in a restaurant, but the power of a good story is undeniable. A well-told story doesn't just inform — it affects. It bypasses logic and lands in the body. That’s the power of narrative: it engages the nervous system, the heart, and memory all at once.

Your story holds your next step.
Let’s discover it together.