Vertigo

On Feb. 27 I woke up with the room spinning around my head.

Google found me some apparently-real medical sites when I looked up "dizzy."

I learned immediately that there is a fork in the "dizzy" road between "light-headed" and "vertigo." I followed the "vertigo" path down the symptom list, and stopped at "if this is the first time this has happened, call your doctor."

When you "call your doctor," they invariably say "come in," so I skipped the "calling" part and went straight to the "going in" part. I am lucky and get my medical care at the University's health service -- I can drop in and see a doc any time during regular business hours, without an appt. Feb 27 was a good day to go to health service -- it was spring break, so hardly anyone was there. This meant it was not only quicker than usual, but fewer germy students coughed on me.

I was diagnosed with Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo, which is tiny little calcium bits in the balance part of your ear. Apparently the teensy "stones" knock on nerve endings and thus confuse the information your brain gets about your orientation in space.

BPPV turns out to be the most common cause of vertigo, especially amongst women of a certain age.......

The way you fix it is to move the calcium bits, by moving your head in a prescribed pattern, from where they bother you to where they won't. Odd, eh?

I am grateful that it was nothing worse than that. I had episodes of vertigo on the 27th, nothing on the 28th, two episodes on the 29th. Since then I have felt mildly off balance a few times, but have had no more experience of the room whizzing round and round. (Let us all take a moment and be sympathetic to people who have vertigo all the time -- I don't know how they can function.)

As complicated as our bodies are, I don't suppose I should be surprised that such a tiny thing could bring me to my knees, but ... I am.


http://www.mayoclinic.org/balance/bppv.html