Spinning.

The sensation of the entire world spinning out of control woke me from a deep sleep.  My dark bedroom was whirling every direction.  I clamped my eyes, shutting out the blackness, but my mind was besieged by flashing cyclones spinning out of control.  I struggled to bring normalcy to my consciousness, and eventually, the tumbling sensation subsided.

What had happened?  Nothing I had ever experience before outside of an amusement park’s spinning cyclone ride could compare to the unexpected and unwelcomed interruption to a good night’s sleep.  I tried to shake off the feeling of dread that was creeping into my psyche and threatening to traumatize me into imagining the worst.  Despite my attempts to explain away the dizzy feeling as a fluke, I immediately imagined an incurable malady was turning my world upside down.

I concentrated on trying to go back to sleep so that I could hopefully wake up from this bad dream and my world would be right again.  Cautiously, I opened my eyes a few hours later to the welcomed light of day.  The room was peacefully still and the swirling had ceased.  I breathed a sigh of relief.

All was going well until I leaned a bit too far down and to the right.  Suddenly, that dreadful tipping of the universe recurred.  This wasn’t a nightmare because I was no longer sleeping.  I carefully evaluated the vertigo that threatened to envelope my world.  Was I a hazard to myself if I resumed my everyday activities?  Would this feeling strike when I was driving a car or tractor?  Could this happen again in a blink of an eye?  I was worried.

I spoke to friends and coworkers about this strange occurrence to get a sense of what others might have experienced.  I heard one story of an uncle who had a similar dizzy spell and was told there was no medical cure and he would have to live with it.  Yikes.  That wasn’t the answer I was hoping for.

A conversation with another friend with whom I was sharing my health concerns left me with more hope.  She told me that, as part of her graduate studies, she had job shadowed an audiologist.  The vertigo I was feeling was treatable.  She suggested I get to a doctor who specialized in treating issues with the inner ear.

Protein crystals could have migrated out my inner ear, she said.  These crystals are what send signals to the brain and help determine balance.  When these crystals shift out of their assigned spot, the resulting vertigo would be instantaneous.  After hearing my friend's advice, it sounded like a doctor’s appointment might be the ticket to getting my life back to normal.  I made the call.  The three-week wait was long and nerve wracking.  I learned to avoid movements that set off the tumbler turmoil in my life.

As a child, I never enjoyed the giant spinning barrel that other children skillfully ran through by climbing its walls as they dashed to the other end.  The one time I attempted to follow my friends, I found myself falling, and rolling, rolling, and rolling until the attendant finally stopped the barrel and allowed me to crawl permanently away.  I never hoped to experience that sensation again.  Now, a half century later, I found myself tumbling again and it was no barrel of laughs.

I waited patiently in the doctor’s office for my turn to benefit from the skillful analysis of the physician and the audiologist.  After preliminary tests that made me strain to hear various sound pitches and hit a button at the moment they became audible, I finally was put into the hands of a young woman who asked me questions about the vertigo I was experiencing.

After the initial round of questions, she asked me to recline on my left side.  I had already told her the dizziness only struck when I was on my right side.  Finally, she told me to keep eye contact with her as I slowly reclined backwards on my right side.  And then the room began to swirl.  “There it is,” she said.  “The rapid eye movement is there.  Relax and we’ll get things back in order.”

With my head cupped in her hands, she lowered my head so that it was tipped back and below the medical examination table on which I lay.  She asked me to slowly roll to my left, and a few minutes later instructed me to sit up slowly.  I looked at her in astonishment.  The strange imbalance that had plagued my world for nearly a month had vanished.  I couldn’t believe this was all it took to stop my world from spinning.  The audiologist probably sensed my skepticism.  So, she asked me to repeat the right-side recline and this time there was no spinning examination room.  I was ecstatic.

As I prepared to depart, the doctor cautioned me to be prepared to come back perhaps one more time for the audiologist's treatment.  After that, he suggested it would be unlikely that my inner ear’s protein crystals would be sending my world spinning again.  He sent me on my way, cautioning me to wear ear plugs when driving tractors, running chain saws, or whenever I am around loud and noisy machinery.  He pointed out there was already damage that had been done from past neglect, but that I could avoid permanent hearing loss by just using plugs or ear protection headsets.

I heeded the warning and stocked up on ear plugs on my drive home.  I was glad the cure to my vertigo was such a simple procedure and that there are knowledgeable  friends and physicians who provided the answer to my ailment.  Thankfully, while my world still seems to spin out of control at times, my vertigo has vanished.  I have a new found respect for protein crystals and the control they have over our lives.  Nature’s balancing act is hard to beat.  Don't take it for granted.  

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