The Spins

When I was younger, I had a recurring nightmare about being trapped underwater. I wasn't exactly trapped, I just found myself deep in the water, unable to tell which way was up. It always concluded in panic and then I'd wake up. I spent my childhood diving off the raft at the beach, water skiing, jumping off the cliffs at red rocks... in any number of situations where I'd end up in the lake so the underwater part made sense. As far as the panic, I've always been somewhat claustrophobic, which is probably where the fear of entrapment came from in the dream.

I haven't had that dream in a while, but when I moved to Boulder, I started experiencing a similar feeling. It started when I was taking a shower and suddenly up and down weren't as clear as they usually are. The room felt like it was rocking like a boat and my feet didn't feel securely grounded. At first, I attributed it to the altitude change of moving to over 5,000 feet above sea level. It seemed a little strange since I lived at nearly 10,000 feet for a year in Ecuador with no problems, but most people I talked to confirmed that made sense. But then it continued. For the next two and a half months, I experienced a similar feeling of dizziness or unbalance almost regularly.

I cut out swimming, wondering if the water in my ears was contributing to the effect. I cut out alcohol and dark chocolate. A friend told me that cutting out dairy had helped her a bit and at that point I decided I needed to see a doctor. It would take a confident professional opinion telling me to cut dairy out of my diet before I could give up cheese and yogurt.

After I explained my symptoms to a general practitioner, she insisted on a pregnancy test then and there, which added panic to my dizziness. When it came back negative, she diagnosed me with benign paroxysmal positional vertigo or BPPV. She felt that basically the little rocks in my inner ear (otoconia) had been thrown out of whack, possibly by our move to a higher altitude, possibly from some unknown cause. She gave me some exercises to do and then told me that it should go away sometime. Maybe in a week, maybe in a few months.

I am not entirely confident about her opinion. Maybe it is because I went to see her with three kids in tow on a snow day and both she and I seemed to want to get me out of there as quickly as possible. Or maybe it's because it seemed like more of a guess than a confident diagnosis.

I started doing Google searches on dizziness. This is a bad, bad idea. I'm pretty sure that if you do a Google search for a runny nose you will end up feeling like you are simultaneously suffering from cancer, a heart attack, and some dread disease that you got from eating ground beef. Also a bad idea? Talking to people you don't know well about your medical issues. I have heard about moms who can no longer take care of their kids because they are so dizzy and an aunt who has been taking valium for years now. Awesome.

I have an appointment with an ENT next week, which I will go to without any kids. The ENT also happens to be a neighbor and friend so I'm confident she will give me the time and attention to hear out my symptoms. She will do a hearing test and some other tests to check out my inner ear. She will hopefully either confirm the other doctor's diagnosis, see it as something else, or at least rule out some possibilities.

The good thing though is that I haven't been feeling dizzy for almost two weeks now. (I am almost scared to write that, as if it might somehow make it come back.) But I can say that I have never had such appreciation for waking up and just seeing the world the same way I've seen it for 35 years. The ground is the ground and the sky is the sky and it's all good, even if it is negative a billion degrees outside.

So I'm hoping that this is the end of the story. I'd like to imagine that it is and that I can provide one story against a thousand on a Google search for dizziness that has a happy ending.

Oh, and if you have a friend whose life was ruined by being dizzy? Kindly keep that story out of the comments on this blog :)