Writes Shayla Love, in "Why Dizziness Is Still a Mystery/Balance disorders like vertigo can be devastating for patients—but they’re often invisible to the doctors who treat them" (The New Yorker).
October 12, 2023
"Once you’ve been dizzy for a while, it can be hard to tell when you’re feeling better."
"As I got used to going about daily activities, I sometimes asked myself: am I still dizzy, or not? What does a non-dizzy state even feel like? Lately, I have come to think of dizziness itself as an absence, not a presence. It is the opposite of balance—the foil to knowing where your body is in space. Many things have to be working properly for you to feel balanced; only one needs to malfunction to send your world spinning. This is why I had so much trouble talking about my dizziness. It’s like trying to describe a silence, or a shadow...."
Writes Shayla Love, in "Why Dizziness Is Still a Mystery/Balance disorders like vertigo can be devastating for patients—but they’re often invisible to the doctors who treat them" (The New Yorker).
Writes Shayla Love, in "Why Dizziness Is Still a Mystery/Balance disorders like vertigo can be devastating for patients—but they’re often invisible to the doctors who treat them" (The New Yorker).
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Warning: silly comment on serious topic.
Any article dealing with the word "Dizzy" should suddenly modulate to an unexpected idea at least twice. Twice at minimum, more would be better.
That's what I learned from Tommy Roe, so many many years ago. IYKYK. Ho ho!
This subject is timely, as my wife has been dealing with this for the last 9 months. Thanks!
I started taking Allegra for allergies. I'd get mild vertigo while just sitting at my desk.
The FAA restricts which allergy medicine airmen can take. Allegra is not on the list of approved medicines.
A few years ago, I woke up one morning with severe vertigo, so bad I couldn't stand up and walk. I had to crawl to the bathroom to vomit. I hadn't vomited in 4 decades.
It was "benign positional vertigo" — just something that can happen within your inner ear.
After I almost broke my hand last week, I got up and started to walk, before I started feeling dizzy and then losing consciousness. I've been pondering the feeling of impending doom as it happened. It radiated up to my brain and shorted it out. I figured that is probably what death is like.
Lots of mysterious ailments and disease after Chic Com Covid/ Big pharma jab.
My aunt who died last July at 94 had dizzy spells for years. Doctors tried a lot of things. I looked it up, she really had distabilization. Balance and orientation is dependent on the inner ear, the eyes and the sense from the soles of the feet. My aunt had hearing damage from surgery when she was 40, thickening of the fluid in the ears with age and old people's feedback from their extremities just happens.
My aunt got the spells of dizziness to be less frequent. Used carts from the parking lot to navigate from car to store when there was no ceiling to give good visual orientation. I also got her a folding walking cane which gave her another orientation point. She got one well for the most part after adapting.
I used my years at sea with seasickness in foul weather to inform my suggestions. I've had real seasickness where first you are afraid you are going to die, but then you start to fear you won't to the point where you promise anyone, anything, if they will only kill you.
It was "benign positional vertigo"
It seems as if they could have thought of a more apposite adjective.
I've never been subject to attacks of vertigo, but three or four years ago in my office I started feeling weird and almost immediately I was hit with a spell of vertigo. I was startled at how miserable it made me felt. I had to lie down on the floor with the light off until it subsided.
This made me think of a retired former office colleague, who periodically was sick with vertigo. She was hard-working and excellent at her job, and I knew she must have been seriously debilitated to take days (or sometimes weeks) of sick time when vertigo hit her. However, it wasn't until I had that spell of vertigo that I really understood how miserable it can be. I couldn't imagine feeling that way for prolonged spells of time, or being subject to it regularly.
I had one or two other fits of vertigo within a week or two of the initial attack and it has since never reoccurred (so far).
I suffer from periodic BPPV (benign paroxysmal positional vertigo-dizziness and vomiting lasting 12-plus hours.
Sometimes you can fix vertigo with the Epley Maneuver. It's safe and easy and you can do it at home:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epley_maneuver
But be careful. You have to know which ear is causing the problem. You do the Epley Maneuver differently for different ears, and if you do it the wrong way, you can make the problem worse. You use the Dix-Hallpike test to first see if your problem is treatable with the Epley Maneuver and then to determine which way you should do the Epley Maneuver.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dix%E2%80%93Hallpike_test
(I don't know if the article talked about this. Paywall and all. My apologies if it did.)
I assumed the cause of dizziness was pretty well understood.
Mostly it comes from playing trumpet with your cheeks puffed out.
In the last 10 years or so, I have suffered from occasional bouts of vertigo. I find I can usually fix the problem with the Epley Maneuver, which means one of the tiny floating bony particles in my inner ear gets mis-located in the wrong channel, which makes sense since almost all of my episodes start with me moving my head too quickly in certain directions (especially to the left and up). On the other occasions, I woke up with it, but probably a sudden movement of the head when I was asleep is what set it off.
I haven't had an episode in the last 3 years, but I also am very careful not the move my head quickly in any direction. I also keep some meclizine and ondansetron available to help treat those cases where the Epley Maneuver doesn't immediately fix the problem and to treat the nausea. Vertigo is not fun at all. My mother also suffers from it, but in her case the causes are not positional, she also keeps the meclizine and ondansetron for treatment.
Gerda's link is important. I thought I was having a stroke the first time I developed BPP vertigo. I went to a neurologist who told me to come back later for an Epley Maneuver. I was practically passing out and thought, why wait? And pay twice?
I looked up Epley Maneuver online and within minutes of doing it, the vertigo disappeared. It comes back occasionally, and I fix it instantly. Johns Hopkins also has a good description of how to do it.
I can't believe doctors don't share this information with patients. A co-worker of mine was told to stay in bed until his vertigo went away. We told him about Epley and he fixed himself -- after several days of being incapacitated and nauseous. The maneuver is harmless. It helps to have a spotter hold your head. Crack, I hope you feel better soon.
A defective gyroscope engenders an unbalanced perspective.
Vertigo and dizziness are not the same thing. Vertigo is the illusion that the world is spinning around you. You can induce it artificially by turning around rapidly several times and then stopping. Dizziness is an impairment of the sense of balance. Nothing is spinning, you just have the constant feeling that you may be about to fall over. It’s sort of like being on a gently rolling ship. I’ve had both, so I’m sort of a connoisseur.
Somehow we all happened on a topic for agreement.
Dizzyness.
A friend that I golf with has suffered from vertigo for years. Several months ago, he went to see a different eye doctor. The doctor did some testing and determined that he might be able to resolve it by placing a prism in his prescription lens. And it did! He's absolutely delighted with the result.
Wow, if I woke up with Vertigo and couldn't get out of bed and threw up. I would be scared to death.
But then as my wife says, I'm a real man-baby when it comes to illnesses.
I had an episode 2 1/2 years ago, and although I drive and work at age 76 I still have equilibrium problems. To be clear, my doctor uses the term dizzy to describe it. The Epley method within two days of the attack brought me almost back to normal. However, I don’t know which ear is causing the problem so I will immediately look into the Dix-Hallpike test.
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