Tuesday morning I woke up at 4:00 am astride an interstellar rollercoaster from hell.
As I rolled to the left, some microscopic crystalline nuggets in my left ear danced amid my semicircular canals, causing me to experience gravity coming from all directions and no direction, simultaneously.
I screamed, and rolled to the floor, in an effort to overpower the signals inside of me and reassure myself that Earth was still holding me. You are here. I am here. We are still together. I held her with my fingers outstretched as wide as possible, my face pressed into the carpeting next to the bed, my everything nestled in, until I was certain that I was going to be sick, and crawled my way onto the tile floor of the bathroom.
I’ll spare you the gory details, but let you know that the next three hours had a particular seven minute cadence to them as those crystals whirled and stuck.
Eventually I found my safe position, a very particular arrangement of my right ear on a 30 degree incline, slight tilt of the nose toward the floor, my head supported by three pillows tucked just so, and my body stretched on the cool tile. The cadence slowed, but intensified, and the next twelve hours had moments of reprieve and long stretches of terror.
Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo was named by an idiot. It means, basically, you’re not actually sick or dying, but you’ve got some rogue crystals floating amid the three semicircular canals causing it to feel like you are. Ostensibly, finding and holding a position is miserable for up to a minute, and then fine, as the snow globe settles.
Some minutes are longer than others.
We tried and failed to perform the fancy mechanical maneuver - The Epley - that is supposed to twist and shake these bad boys out into the vestibule and eliminate the sensation entirely, nearly instantly, but each time we attempted, I couldn’t complete the steps without stopping to vomit.
I am infinitely grateful to my person, who persisted through this holy terror with me, listening to my wails and screams, and each hideous prayer to Father John, the porcelain god. He brought me the green camping pad to soften the harshness of the tile on my hip, and stayed with me where literally no one has before.
In college, I first encountered the vomit unicorns that so many of you are. You vomit once or twice, in a dainty, quiet, contained way. Since my early childhood, my experience a wretched, consistent cadence that does not stop without the miracle of pharmaceutical support. I have prayed and willed the gods of ginger and mint, wrist bands and essential oils, and only twice have I stopped an episode with remedies predating the pharmaceutical industry.
After 12 hours, I messaged my doctor, and they agreed to prescribe me the holy sacrament of Zofran. If you suffer with vertigo or nausea, may I suggest that you keep this stuff on hand? I will be making a locket so that I can wear one next to my heart at all times, as it helped me decouple the nausea from the dizziness.
And dizziness is not the right term. I have experienced dizziness. I was a figure skater for years, and could spin 36 times in a predictable orientation to gravity. I know dizziness. I know it subsides. I have a strong stomach in the face of that sort of predictable dizziness.
Vertigo, or at least the way in which I experience vertigo, needs a new word. I’m not sure what it is. For now, I’ll call it “vestibular fuckery,” which feels more like being spiritually dismembered in eight dimensions at once. It’s a sort of sensation you cannot conceive of and I hope you never experience.
At the prompting of my friend and Higher Council maven Jen Wilking, I located a vestibular specialist - a PT with specific training in vestibular fuckery AND the mechanisms to abate it. Wednesday morning, my person gently loaded me in the car, drove me the hellacious few miles to the nearest office, and we navigated the back stairwells of the medical building to avoid the elevator. Dear god, never the elevator.
I hadn’t showered, I had just made the weakest attempts with a washcloth, doused myself with dry shampoo, and put on all new clothing that did not have to go over my head. I wore my kn95, as required by the building and the practice, and breathed in the stench that reminds me of the inside of McDonald’s chicken nugget containers, back in the 80’s, when they were made of styrofoam. When I introduced myself to Levi, I said I was sorry, but I thought I would likely throw up on him.
He said he understood.
Before I let him lay hands on me, I grilled him.
“Are you a legitimate vestibular specialist, or are you just a PT who had an opening on your schedule?” I asked, because I needed to be very certain he knew what he was doing before he forced me back onto the rollercoaster.
“I’m legit.” He said, “I only work on people with concussions and vertigo.”
Ok.
He maneuvered and twisted me, watching the strange movements of my eyes every time things got bad.
The eyes tell the story. They try to go where the crystals are telling them to look, and so this involuntary movement tells the skilled onlooker which canal is offending at the moment so they can contort you and guide those little nuggets out into the vestibule where they can go to meet their makers.
It was a miracle.
I felt 70% better. I could walk a bit better, look into the distance. He reassured me that if I felt dizzy, just to hold the new position, wait, and it would ultimately resolve.
When I got home, I tried it. I eased myself onto my left side on the couch, supported by seven pillows, and felt the tilt-a-whirl.
But.
Within a minute, it stopped, and I fell asleep.
The rest of the evening was pretty ok - and ate the equivalent of what you might feed a toddler for dinner, which was a far cry above the nothing I’d eaten. And I slept, on my right side, but in the bed all night.
When I woke up I felt 40-50%. Not nearly as good as the evening before, but not as bad as the morning prior either. We headed back to see Levi.
I passed his first few test maneuvers with very little eye movement, until we hung out in one for more than a minute - a long minute - and it started.
And it didn’t stop.
He stayed calm, to his credit, as he flopped me back and forth like a pancake, jarring and chasing the crystals around my inner ear as my body started to shake from the adrenaline, and I started to cry.
More than the BPPV, this was cupulolithiasis, which is a fancy Latin way of saying
“Houston, we have a stuck rock.”
He says we can fix it. We’ll chase it out, and then we’ll work on habituating to the dizziness, and then the PTSD.
“You are probably doing 1,000 things in your daily life to brace and protect yourself from this. Things you’re not even aware of. You work really hard just to have a sort of normal life,” he said.
I left in shambles.
Yes, the flopping and rollercoaster and adrenaline were no picnic, but the tears were from the validation. While it is in fact - quite literally - all within my head, this explains the dozens of mini modifications I make every day. My extreme distaste of downhill activities (hiking, sledding, biking), of rollercoasters and inner tubing, my epic fear of falling when rock climbing, my caution. My guardedness. My vigilance.
I keep crying about this.
As much as I am still floating on an improvised life raft with a whistle in my mouth, I am not in the water, and there is a shore.
I’m gonna have to swim, I know. I’ve got an appointment with Levi again on Monday, and I don’t expect it will be tea and crumpets. Until then I live life in six hour increments between doses of Zofran, with occasional sips of high fructose nourishment and Rold Gold pretzels.
It isn’t all bad. In fact, the past few days have been a mixture of coping and meditating and prayer, which in my world are all about the same thing. The soft space between coherence with this world and whatever else exists.
This experience, and those previous, are formative to my sensitivity and capacity to know how someone else is feeling and say just the right thing. It has lead to my study, to the clarity of my philosophy that I believe equally in medicine and magic.
Interestingly, it also seems to inform my vestibular approach to Yin yoga.
Bernie has his tattvas of yin: find the edge, find stillness, hold for time (come out with awareness).
Mine are about accommodating the pose: change the angle, change the support, change the orientation to gravity (change the pose).
This is precisely how to manage vertigo.
Can you believe it?
I’ve been teaching it all along, the secret memo of my survival, reframed for the masses.
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If you are ever so unfortunate as to experience vertigo, or to connect with someone who is experiencing vertigo of any intensity, please send them along to a vestibular specialist. My mother, who experienced these things in the late 60’s received no support and suffered for months. I hate that. I hate that I suffered with this in previous episodes in many ways, and I hope that you will not. That you will access relief sooner by asking for just the right sort of help.
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Thanks for reading,
Sat nam
PS: If you’re wondering what sorts of things are quite impossible to do without tilting your head even slightly in any direction, here is my top ten:
1. Shampooing
2. Figuring out what is making your belly itch
3. Unloading the dishwasher
4. Sneezing
5. Drinking from a glass without a straw
6. Sleeping without seven pillows and some Fear of God
7. Walking down stairs
8. Figuring out if a car is coming before you cross the street
9. Casually reading a book
10. Taking the dog for a walk