Fifteen years ago, or so, I awoke one morning to see the light fixture above my head orbiting the ceiling like a renegade Sputnik.
“Whoa,” I said, but it didn’t, so I turned toward the door, to find that image arcing as well.
I needed to take action, so I defocused my eyes, slipped on my pants and shirt, steadied myself against the wall, then hung to the railing as I staggered down the stairs .
“You’ve got yourself a case of vertigo,” the inner voice said. “Inner-ear trouble.”
Indeed. I crept down to the road, there while traversing the bounds of the eight-foot shoulder side to side, as I struggled down the hill and onto Lawyer’s Road.
“Surely walking will help this, “I said to myself. “It helps everything else. I can avoid falling if I de- focus.”
After about a quarter mile, I came to a bridge, then leaned against its concrete barrier for a few minutes, to view the world at rest, again. Then I inched back home, to find a definition for “vertigo:” “a sensation of motion in which the individual’s surroundings seem to whirl dizzily.”
“That’s me,” I said.
I had no more vertigo until mid-summer, when I noticed that if my head began to sweat, the next day still objects would seem to whirl, and trying to focus on them made me dizzy. So any time I sweated, I began dousing my head with water from a bottle or a garden hose. This made me cooler right away; the next morning I had no vertigo. I thought I had a cure.
I found out different after I stood outside in the cold at a Veteran’s Day celebration, rubbing my hands to keep them warm and wishing I had brought a cap to do the same for my ears.
“I’m simply freezing,” I heard another musician say.
“Me too,” I shivered.
We waited to go on for about two more hours; by then my hands were so cold I could barely hold the banjo.
After we finished playing, I stayed to hear a really good Gospel Band, but then told the others ,“I’ve just got to go.”
The next day came dizziness and queasy stomach. “Maybe if I’d kept my head warm …” I thought.
After this I finally saw my doctor, who referred me to an ear, nose and throat specialist. The ENT explained that the probable cause of my dizziness was that tiny crystals had formed in the fluid of my inner ear, tricking my brain into turning still objects into moving ones. Still, he said we had to rule out other causes , such as a tumor on the auditory nerve. That test was negative.
In the vertigo test, a technician placed hoses in my ears then turned on a machine which pumped hot air into them. At first puff, I became as dizzy as a wino in a water bucket. When I got over the shock of the hot air, the technician turned on the cold air, from which I felt nothing at first, but then a milder dizziness. After I recovered from that test, she showed me to a waiting room, to wait for the results of her work.
“You don’t have a tumor,” the ENT said, standing above me. “That’s the good news …”
“And the bad news?”
“ There is no treatment for your vertigo, ” he said, then turned to leave.
“Before you go, Doc, I know something that might help somebody like me. “
“Oh? … ” he said as he looked away.
“If I cool my head with water, I don’t get vertigo the next day.”
“Umh,” he said, then handed me the paper work, told me where to take it, then left the room.
“What’s under his crupper?” I wondered. “Am I wearing a diss me sign?”
No, but I was wearing a diss me outfit: a shirt which looked like it had been cut from the table cloth at the fish camp, wide work-suspenders, blue jeans, and white socks. I don’t own any brogans.
“What was I thinking?” I asked. “No wonder he wouldn’t listen.”
Still, I thought he should have paid more attention to my words than to my wardrobe — for part of his own his test brought on vertigo when it applied heat to my ears. I had tried to suggest a simple variant of his own procedure, which prevented vertigo by cooling the head down with water whenever my heat sweated.
With a bit of the rebel at hand, I decided that because he would not accept my information, I would try to refute his. Soon after that I found another ENT’s online offer of exercises to treat Benign Positional Vertigo.
I typed in my credit card information, entered “$19.00” in the payment box, hit enter, and shortly after printed out the Exercises for Vertigo, stapled the pages together, then called my wife to help me carry them out.
I was confident these movements would foam my semi-circular canals, dissolving the offending crystals back into the clear fluid, and allowing me to move around without dizziness, while simultaneously refuting my ENT’s diagnosis.
I lay down on the bed so that my head hung over its foot. P.J. steadied my cranium before I twisted it violently to the right, then returned to center and rested. Next, I twisted violently to the left, then back to center and rested. There were multiple variations of this procedure; we completed every one.
After we finished the online procedure I didn’t feel much worse than when we began. But next morning, I remember waking to light-fixture spin at a greatest arc, and greatest speed I had ever seen, perhaps a harbinger of the most severe case of vertigo I have had in my life. The harbinger was right — I found myself out of commission for at least a week.
So, what did I learn? Walk every day, summer, winter, fall, and spring — rain, snow, sleet, or shine. Avoid serving as my own doctor, and when I needed an ENT again, to find one who was able to listen, and to visit him in Sunday clothes.
Leon Smith is a storyteller and regular contributor to The Anson Record.