Let the spinning wheel spin

Ladies and gentlemen, it is official.  I am off-balance.  I’ve become a Weeble.

For those of you unfamiliar with Weebles, I’ve added a short video to get you up to speed.

Early last Sunday morning, I rolled over in my bed, only to discover that the ceiling fan was rotating.  The only problem was that it wasn’t turned on!  After a few seconds, it stopped, but a bit later I found myself staggering to the bathroom and when I returned and climbed back into my bed, it felt as if the bed was moving like water sloshing about in a bucket, and I had to hold on for fear of falling off it.

Although it reminded me of my one and only hangover nearly 10 years ago courtesy of a misadventure with some gin (this is still a joke around the small English village where we lived at the time), the previous night I’d only had a couple of small glasses of wine at a family gathering which were certainly not enough to cause this reaction.  And, unlike my memories of “the” hangover (I can decisively say “the” as I plan never to duplicate the experience!), my stomach was not upset except for the brief moments when the room seemed to be moving.  In a very non-egotistical sense, I suppose I could say, that for much of this week, the world has indeed been revolving around me!

Did you know that there is a difference between vertigo and dizziness?  With dizziness you feel rather spacey and unsteady, but with vertigo you feel like you’re spinning on the midway ride from hell.  Vertigo is nasty business.  Since Sunday (this is now Thursday), if the room hasn’t been spinning around me, I’ve been dizzy and have been staggering about like a drunk.  One morning, it took an hour of laying as still as possible on the sofa with my eyes tightly closed, to make it stop.  Even trying to reposition my pillow sent my brain spinning around at a dizzying rate.

I’ve been tired, and have spent most of the last 4 days dozing on the sofa with the television on.  The puzzling thing is that I haven’t had other symptoms such as fever, vomiting, or headache.  Last night I finally decided to see a doctor.  If not for the fact that our doctor is a half hour drive away and I didn’t feel I should be driving, I probably would have and should have sought medical advice sooner.

He checked me over and concluded that I am suffering from either benign positional vertigo or vestibular neuronitis.  The good news is that neither is permanent, but since benign positional vertigo can recur for a variety of reasons including a change in barometric pressure, you can safely bet I’m hoping that it’s vestibular neuronitis.  I never want to feel this way again.

Ironically, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard the term vestibular.  A friend of mine had a dog recently diagnosed with old dog vestibular, a balance related condition that occurs in older dogs.  I suppose I should be grateful that I wasn’t diagnosed with that! 

I’m doing much better today, and due in part to determination, I am trying to function normally.  The world today has so far ceased to revolve around me and I’m dealing with just a bit of dizziness.  I’m still staggering a bit and my stance is a bit wider than normal to help me balance better, but perhaps because I’ve grown used to my warped view of the world, I only wobble, just like a Weeble, and so far, I haven’t fallen down!