And Then There's This Thing

I was in the urgent care center yesterday to see a doctor about this thing.

This thing started last Saturday when I woke up with a headache and nausea and dizziness. I assumed it was a migraine, so I skipped going to the studio and instead lay in bed all day. The headache lasted about six or eight hours and the nausea subsided for a time but the dizziness didn't go away. I felt fine as long as I held my head perfectly still, but when I stood up or turned my head, I would feel like the world was spinning around. I assumed I was dehydrated, so I loaded up on the fluids and it didn't help. I lay off the caffeine and it didn't help. I tried stretching out my shoulders and neck (they were tight and sore from a visit to the gym the day before) and it didn't help. That was Saturday. Sunday I got up and felt dizzy again. When I turned my head or looked up, it got worse. Monday, it was the same. Tuesday, the same.

I was getting pretty anxious about it. I didn't feel safe driving so I was kind of trapped in the house. I didn't feel like going anywhere anyway because whenever I moved I would feel dizzy and sometimes nauseous. The Brain is a well-known hypochondriac (already insisting that we had everything from a stroke to a brain tumor) so I avoided looking up my symptoms on the internet. Finally, after five days of feeling drunk, I asked Dave to take me to the doctor.

The doctor did an exam and diagnosed me with something called benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV). It's benign in the sense that it's not going to kill me, I imagine, and it mostly goes away on its own after a week or two (although from what I've read it tends to recur and some people suffer from it for years) and there are some effective treatments for it. The doctor gave me a prescription for an antihistamine that combats motion sickness, similar to Dramamine. I filled the prescription but I haven't taken it yet because I am a wimp about taking medications.

I actually feel a bit better today. Some of it is a lessening of symptoms (I can stand up without feeling like the world's spinning) and some of it is, I'm sure, a lessening of the anxiety that comes along with feeling like the world is never going to stop spinning.

A week or two of vertigo is probably not the worst thing that will ever happen to me, but it sucks anyway.