Like Being Let Out Of Prison
my recent miracle
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This is the story of a miracle.
On Christmas morning, 2021, I got up early and opened my presents.
Most of the people who matter to me live far away, so most of the stuff under my tree had come shipped via the United States Postal Service, in big boxes. I saved the biggest box. Then I broke down all the other boxes, gathered up the wrapping paper, and filled the biggest box with all the detritus. I got dressed and went outside, intending to put the box into my car, for later transportation to the recycling center.
My apartment is a segmented portion of a very large Victorian, part of the top floor. The landlords live in the main part. They park at the top of the sloping driveway. I park where they tell me to park, halfway down.
As a result of this, I am the only one who has to cross the driveway on foot in the winter. They are responsible for the condition of the driveway, per the lease, but they do a terrible job at tending to it. (This could be a whole post in and of itself, but the short version—my area has such an extreme housing crisis that even with this one, very serious, issue, I’m better off than 99% of renters.)
I was very careful, taking one slow step at a time, but ice is slippery, and I slipped.
I caught myself with my right hand, and broke my wrist.
That it was broken was immediately obvious from the amount of pain and swelling I experienced. I wasn’t eager to try again to get my car, even to take myself to the hospital, and so toughed it out until Monday, December 27. Then I went to Urgent Care.
During the six hours I spent waiting to get an x-ray and an immobilizing brace, around a hundred people came in and out, coughing. Nearly all were seeking a COVID test.
This was when the Omicron variant was sweeping the country, and that’s what I caught. It was nothing, quite literally the mildest cold of my life. (Most of my colds drag on and on, threatening to turn into bronchitis.) I had a 36-hour runny nose, and that was it. If I hadn’t know that COVID existed and a variant was going around, not only would I not have tested for anything—I doubt that I’d have even noticed. That’s what a nothingburger Omicron was.
What Happened Next
My wrist healed and the runny nose went away, but I started having vertigo.
At first, I thought it was a manifestation of the pain. With broken-bone pain ongoing, the world spinning when I laid down didn’t seem unreasonable.
But even after my wrist healed, the vertigo continued. Every single time I laid down, got down on the floor to do sit-ups, got into a dentist’s chair, or otherwise made my body horizontal, the world would spin. Also, anytime I got overly tired, found myself experiencing a serious PTSD triggering, or was unusually stressed out, I could look forward to a vertigo attack.
Those triggers are manageable, but when it started happening—very occasionally, thank goodness, perhaps once a month or so—randomly and seemingly without any triggers, I started to feel my life collapsing around me.
Conversations of the “if this gets worse, you know you have to stop driving, right?” sort are scary for anyone.
For someone without a family, they are beyond terrifying.
Uber and taxis are prohibitively expensive, and yet even remote workers have to go places occasionally. What the hell was I going to do?
The Test
This week, I went to see a specialist, not daring to get my hopes up.
She explained that most vertigo is caused by calcium crystals in the inner ear that move out of place for some reason, usually head trauma. They get lodged in the wrong position, causing vertigo.
She would conduct a test, she explained. If that was my problem, it would be quite easy to tell, and an easy fix. If it wasn’t my problem, then the next step would be a referral to a neurologist.
For the test, she would put a contraption over my eyes that records eye movements. Then she would put me in various positions, with my head and neck at particular angles. It’s very simple logical deduction. Vertigo in this position with the head and neck at this angle indicates crystals in this spot; vertigo in another position with head and neck at another angle, crystals in that spot. The intensity of the vertigo would indicate the size of the deposit.
The eye movements are diagnostic because nystagmus (involuntary eye movements) happen with vertigo. The eyes move in particular directions, as the brain, which thinks the body is falling, desperately tries to correct what it perceives as the problem.
The Miracle
The testing—which resulted in the worst vertigo attack of my life—indicated that I had a very large crystal deposit in a particular part of my right ear.
To fix it, she put me through a modified and intense version of something called the Epley Maneuver. For mild vertigo, there’s an Epley Maneuver that can be learned on YouTube and done at home by most people. This was beyond that; it required my head and neck to be in positions I couldn’t hold by myself, and for longer than I could manage on my own.
We waited ten minutes, and then she had me get back up on the table, where she put me through the testing positions again.
No vertigo.
Gone.
Fixed.
Since then, I’ve slept several times, gotten up and down from the floor probably fifty times, and started taking yoga again.
No vertigo.
The Joy of Freedom
My closest friends have all been subjected to repeated exclamations of how happy I am and how it feels to tilt my head back in the shower, get in and out of bed, and do other things without vertigo. Dozens of long text messages. Whole Discord channels full of OMG OMG OMG THE VERTIGO IS GONE!!
I will spare you all that, as that sort of tolerance is the provence of friends and not readers.
I will just end with this: if you, or anyone you know, suffers from vertigo, do whatever you have to do, up to and including getting on a plane and flying somewhere if it’s not available to you locally, to get vestibular position testing done.
If your vertigo, like mine (and like most people’s) is caused by calcium crystals, you can have it cured in about half an hour.
About My Substack: I’m a data scientist who would rather be a math teacher but, being unwilling to brainwash kids into Woke nonsense, am presently unqualified to teach in the US. So I bring my “math is fun and anyone can learn it” approach to mathematics here to Substack in my series, “How to Not Suck at Math,” (first five entries not paywalled, links at the top of part 5, here). Paid subscribers also have access to a creative writing series in which I post a variety of things, including fiction, descriptions, and other “writing experiments,” along with personal stories that don’t relate to Larger Points I Want To Make About The World.
My other posts are mostly cultural takes from a broadly anti-Woke perspective—yes, I’m one of those annoying classical liberals who would’ve been considered on the left until ten seconds ago. Lately I’ve regained a childhood love of reading and started publishing book reviews, including of the Wokest novel I’ve ever read and memoirs by Rob Henderson and Konstantin Kisin. My most widely useful essay may be this one, about how to resist the demon of self-termination.
WHO SAID U WERE ALLOWED OUT OF PRISON
I was sitting in my office one day and looked up at a picture on the wall. It kept drifting to the left of my visual field and I would jerk my head to the right in compensation. Then the waves of seasick type nausea came. I got up and started walking to my boss’s office to get the ok to go home. But I kept falling to one side and holding onto the wall didn’t steady things enough to traverse that 200 foot chasm. I was too dizzy to walk.
A security officer arrived who called an ambulance and that entailed a $1,000 bill for a one mile drive. The ER doc didn’t have a clue and I was admitted to the hospital. All I was told was that it might be a stroke. That was terrifying. Two days of specialists and an MRI and CAT scan produced no diagnosis.
When I was discharged with no idea what had happened to me I googled the symptoms (of course). There was a local chiropractor who was a specialist in vertigo and the Epply maneuver. One session and it was fixed.
Thanks for educating people on this fairly common condition. It seems that we are often on our own in finding our way to good health.