Komarov has a rare and mysterious disease - idiopathic orthostatic hypotension. The doctoral explanation is: the brain's nerve receptors do not work. They are to send signals to blood vessels to contract and pump blood up when the man gets up. If they don't, oxygen starvation of the brain begins: giddiness, strikes at the ears and eyes, loss of equilibrium, convulsions.
What is interesting, when Komarov is supine his blood pressure is usually OK, 110/60. When he gets up, the tonometer registers a fall to 20/0.
"I cannot stand on my feet for more than five seconds", says Komarov, aged 52, disability group II. "I mostly move squatted about the apartment. My dishes in the kitchen all stand on the floor. I haven't walked out of the house for six months. If get up from the bed and start walking as a normal man, I faint at once".
For years he was in different clinics and the case has been reported to the Neurology Institute in Moscow. Neither costly injections of erythropoietin, used as doping by athletes, nor compression hose for blood vessels could help.
Meanwhile, Komarov does not lose hope for getting well. "For that I'm ready to be made a research specimen", he says.
