That means that there are more pictures (like photos) which show her taking her weight with the feet, but in reality she was hanging by her wrists very often, too. Wrist pains and feet pain are unbearable both, and as a spectator only I can hardly imagine the ordeal of each movement. Especially when the muscles weaken or cramp and the moving is out of her control. I can exactly see how she writhes her body while suffering and so inducing more pain, simply wonderful. But I wonder whether such extreme pain will lead to consciousness... How to prevent???
Who knows? Apparently the Romans knew how to perform a crucifixion in such a way that people rarely died quickly. Some members here, several years ago, wondered if maybe that was one reason for the pre-crucifixion whipping, to gradually build up the pain so it wasn't such an initial shock when the victims found themselves hanging by the nails. Some writers - Jim Bishop, "The Day Christ Died" comes to mind - wrote that it was likely the victims fainted from time to time, and unless they came to consciousness soon, they could die. I do not believe it worked that way, although I do believe they fainted, only from pain to begin with and later both from agony and hyperventilation from panic as a result of something called "Dyspnea" or breathlessness.
"Breathlessness" sounds so benign that for a long time I just glossed over that and didn't take it very seriously. Then I studied what this condition really was and understood how it fit together with death on the cross. Dyspnea is panic. The very best explanation of it I have found is in a book titled "Palliative Care Perspectives" by James L. Hallenbeck. In Chapter 5: Non-Pain Symptom Management: Dyspnea, about three pages in, he defines Dyspnea as "an imbalance between the perceived need to breathe and the perceived ability to breathe." The brain responds to that by going into panic mode, triggering the body to fight to escape whatever is restricting breathing. It's what happens during waterboarding torture.
The way that figures into crucifixion - and correlates with what extreme crucifixion players have told me over the years - is that yes, when hanging on a cross, breathing is different, more labored, but victims don't notice that so much to begin with. However, as the effort tires the breathing muscles, they become more conscious of it. Maybe there is a little fear. Women who had been tied to a cross told me it took two to four hours for breathing to become a factor, to the point where they found themselves wanting to raise themselves to make breathing easier as much as to relieve the pain in their arms and shoulders. One said she "had to struggle mightily to breathe." And one did get into serious trouble finally and had to be revived. In contrast, one man, who was not in great shape, told me that in twenty minutes on the cross he felt he wasn't going to be able to breathe and had to get down. It's important to realize that they experienced this panic, it wasn't because their blood oxygen was depleted, it was simply because they felt it was hard to breathe and their brain was telling them they had to do something, now.
So one cause of fainting was the extreme pain, maybe. The second cause I mentioned was hyperventilation due to panic from Dyspnea, where it drove them to try so hard to struggle to get air, when their body didn't actually need more air, that the hyperventilation caused them to faint. Once they fainted, the panic mode went away and their body corrected itself, regulating its breathing to fit its need for oxygen even though it was labored breathing. The same thing if they fainted from pain; the sudden drop in heart rate corrects itself quickly. In either of those conditions, they would return to agonized consciousness soon, only to start all over again.
Now death on the cross would be different, and that would only come when the last of their body's strength was used up, not just tired, but totally exhausted. They might hang for hours, unable to raise themselves, struggling to get just a little air until they couldn't get enough to maintain consciousness. Then they would probably hang unconscious for some time, still breathing just a little, until it wasn't enough to maintain life any longer. It was the slowest strangulation imaginable, a truly miserable way to die. If you read my story "Altered States," I described what it might have felt like for Maia to die on the cross, all the way to her soul leaving her body. I also mentioned fainting from both causes several times in "The Serpent's Eye."
The important thing is that fainting did not usually mean the victim was going to die, because their body could still maintain life until they regained consciousness. It probably happened a lot while a victim was dying on the cross.