My Battle With Vertigo

Until 2022, I didn’t know what vertigo was. Whenever someone mentioned the word, I always pictured James Stewart looking down from a great height, his face etched with fear. I’ve never had a particular fear of heights, so imagined myself the last candidate for being hit by vertigo.

I write speculative fiction. You know, stuff many people find weird, like time travel, alternate universes, telepathy, teleportation, nanobots in the brain, and people who don’t need to eat, drink, or sleep. It all comes natural to my brain, like there’s a hidden world overlaying what most of us think of as the “real” world, and part of me is living in the hidden world, telling my “real” world self what’s happening over there, so I can write it down as a story or part of a game. In my early 30s, I suffered from severe bouts of depression, and the psych professional I was seeing at the time conjectured that the experience “rewired” my brain, turning me into a different person than I was before. I think that might be true, and might have made me even more abnormal creatively than I already was. But now….

One warm day in April of 2022, I experienced a sensation of being off balance. It happened a couple times during the day. It felt surreal, like I wasn’t in control of my own body. It was concerning, but I suspected the reason was my lack of sufficient sleep the night before.

Later, as I sat at my computer and worked on my fiction, the text moved across the screen to the right and down a bit. What the hell? I wasn’t scrolling. I pulled my hands away and the text kept moving. The more I tried to focus, the more the text moved, until at some point it became an unreadable blur. When I looked away from the computer screen, the whole room spun. Damn.

Walking was impossible. My brain tried to correct my feet when I attempted to take a step, but the “corrections” were incorrect. I got hold of a desk chair with wheels, and used it like a wheelchair to get around, toting a blue pail with me wherever I went due to constant nausea. Even sitting up was tiring, as my upper body constantly attempted unnecessarily to catch its balance. It was easier just to lie down and close my eyes. I spent an entire day in bed.

My insurance provided tele-health benefits, so my wife made a call. At times like this, it’s imperative to have a caring companion. I took the phone and described my symptoms. The doctor said I likely had BPPV. BPPV is a frequent cause of vertigo, and stands for benign paroxysmal positional vertigo. I’m not sure what’s so benign about it. Typically, BPPV is a condition where feelings of vertigo are triggered by movement. That wasn’t the kind of BPPV I had. With me, no movement on my part was necessary. No matter what I did or how motionless I tried to be, the world spun. So I thought maybe I didn’t have BPPV after all. But the tele-health doc recommended Dramamine, a medicine often prescribed for motion sickness. My wife fetched me some, and it eased my symptoms, though far from alleviating them entirely. The nausea stopped, at least.

I made an appointment with a specialist, who recommended physical therapy and gave me referrals, but no official diagnosis. I tried to check out the referred therapists, but still had trouble using the computer. The info I received over the phone confused me. I ended up visiting a physical therapist only to be turned away at their office because although they were in the network for most Cigna insurances, they weren’t in the network for my particular brand of Cigna, and beyond that, they could only treat the most common kind of BPPV, which they were pretty sure I didn’t have. The whole situation was a real mess. A full week after my initial incident, I finally got in to see a physical therapist in my insurance network who could treat my uncommon condition.

By then, my brain had made adjustments on its own. I needed to touch something to aid my brain in the constant calibrations necessary to fight the vertigo and keep me balanced and upright. A cane sufficed. I didn’t often need to put my weight on the cane, but needed its weight in my hand to help my brain stay oriented.

All the extra brain activity left me mentally exhausted most of the time. Trying to do anything on the computer for more than a few minutes at a time was a chore.

The physical therapist lady had me try a number of different maneuvers with my head, and initially none of them helped with a diagnosis. Then she asked me to lay a certain way and turn my head a certain way. I didn’t feel anything out of the ordinary, but she and an assistant both gasped at some movement in my eyes. The assistant had never seen the phenomenon before. The therapist had seen it only a few times in her career, and her specialty was in treating vertigo. I wish I could have seen it. I was right there, but missed my opportunity. 🙂 Whatever they saw, it was conclusive as to the type of BPPV I had.

The therapist instructed me in performing an exercise that had an immediate effect, easing lingering symptoms. But the vertigo wasn’t gone. She gave me a set of exercises to do at home and scheduled me for another visit. While the initial session helped a great deal, I felt far from normal. My insurance covered me for several weeks of visits, for which I’m grateful. I used all the visits they allowed me. When the visits came to an end, the therapist gave me a final set of exercises to do and told me to call back if my symptoms worsened.

Fortunately, the vertigo hasn’t gotten worse since then. Nine months later, it’s still not completely gone. When I go for a walk around the neighborhood, it takes me a while to get up to speed, and my brain grows tired rapidly after I’ve walked for 30 minutes or so. My legs get more wobbly the longer I walk.

But the world doesn’t spin anymore.

Because of the vertigo, I halted some of my many creative endeavors, though I intend to return to them all eventually. A serial fiction on Royal Road needs the last half written. But it’s low priority for now. Many other projects wait in queue for my attention, some involving other creators who in turn are waiting on me. So… I still have big plans, but it will take a bit longer for me to achieve them than it would otherwise. So far, everyone is showing remarkable patience with me. I appreciate it.

But, hey. I have a dream, and I will keep following it as long as there’s enough of my mind and body left to take another step forward. If the products of my creative efforts tilt to the weird side, well, they’d be that way even without the vertigo. If the vertigo swings my works even further into strangeness, I’m absolutely fine with that. I trust some readers out there will be fine with it, too.