Yet dizziness, like pain, isn’t something that can be seen directly in an X-ray or an MRI it must be described by the person who feels it, and terms like “vertigo” and “light-headedness” never seem to capture the entire experience, or how profoundly it can unsettle us. Even children can readily identify it: if you are old enough to play Ring Around the Rosie, you know what it feels like. The experience of dizziness has been documented for thousands of years, and it’s one of the most common complaints that bring people to the doctor. Its name suggested that an unwieldy neurological condition, migraines, could somehow get tangled up with the vestibular system, which helps shape our sense of balance. Even as a health journalist, I had never heard of vestibular migraine. The symptoms of vestibular migraine-the world spinning like a globe, days of painless dizziness-seemed to match. Based on my answers, as well as my sensitivity to light, he at last gave me a diagnosis: vestibular migraine. To understand it, I would need to think about what was going on in my head and my life. My neurologist seemed to be suggesting that dizziness was more than a physical phenomenon. I was going on dates, and thinking about leaving my job for good. I had left a long-term relationship and, for the first time in ten years, was living alone, untethered. Did I get car sick as a child? Did I enjoy roller coasters? What about boats? Had I made any big life changes recently? Finally, we seemed to be making progress: I hate roller coasters and have always been prone to car sickness, and my life had, in fact, changed dramatically of late. I couldn’t look at computer screens, so after a week and a half I took sick leave from my writing job.ĭuring one appointment, my neurologist’s questions began to veer off the medical path. The swirling behind my forehead lasted all day and night. One said that I probably had labyrinthitis, or inflammation of the inner ear, and typed it into my chart. Many different conditions can produce it. It was difficult to diagnose the cause of a dizzy spell, the doctors said, because dizziness is a sensation, not a disease. staff ruled out anything life-threatening, like a stroke, yet they couldn’t say what was wrong. “Something is wrong,” I told her softly.Īt the emergency room, I was helped into a wheelchair because I could barely stand. To let my friend in, I had to crawl the length of my apartment. When it didn’t, I reached for my phone and called a friend who lived nearby. I curled up and waited-prayed-for it to end. I lay down, but the spinning only sped up. I’d had dizzy episodes before, but never anything this intense. When I tilted my head to touch my foot, the room began to rotate like a carrousel. Confusingly, it also felt as though it might float away.īack in my apartment, I rolled out a yoga mat and stretched. sunlight seemed brighter than usual, and the water rippled in a disjointed way, like a film reel missing a few frames. Everything seemed to be in the right place-clouds above me, wooden boardwalk below. I went for a jog along the East River, in Brooklyn. But I felt a lingering unease that my surroundings were not bolted down. The furniture in my room was still, apparently innocent of whatever had just happened. I froze, pillow in hand, and carefully looked around. After half a second, my vision snapped back into position. One morning last August, while making my bed, my entire visual field shifted sharply to the left, as though I were watching a movie and someone had bumped into the projector.
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