I haven’t been tracking my vertigo spells on the blog. I don’t know why. I think I didn’t want to make everyone reading this suffer through repetitive bouts of vertigo with me by my documenting the episodes on the blog directly, each time that I went through one.
I wasn’t really able to type or even make noises beyond gagging on vomit between requests for someone to kill me in the years of suffering that I endured before being prescribed Xanax and Promethazine, which work quite well to subdue the worst parts of rotational vertigo.
…and after the attacks were over, sometimes two days later, I would be unable to do much more than sit up in bed and eat soup for at least a day. So I would have had to remember to go document the event while still recovering from the trauma of the event. Anyone who has had an intense illness can testify just how much they don’t want to go back and revisit just how hellish the event was later. “…and then I blew chunks all over the bathroom floor. Luckily I didn’t fall back into it when I passed out.” All the pain of a drunken bender without the entertainment of being stupid drunk first. Leave it in the past.
Now that I have a medication regimen down, I just have to deal with the fuzzy-headedness the drugs inflict on me. I’m stuck for hours, essentially staring at a fixed point in space so as to anchor the eyes on something. Oops they’re drifting left again. Find the Catbus plushy. No more drift? Okay, back to writing. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. For as long as is necessary. For as long as it takes to get tired and fall asleep.
This year has been really bad. The worst since I stopped working and could eliminate stress by not having to perform on a set schedule every week. The increase in symptoms started February a year ago and has slowly gotten worse. I’m pretty sure it’s the second ear failing on me, having gone bilateral then. If that’s the true cause of my current suffering, then I should level back out after a few miserable years, and hit a different long-lasting trough of capabilities. I’ll just have to take stock again then, see what I can still do.
In the meantime I’m going to start trying to document each time I get full vertigo. Since I can do it while sitting here trying not to spin, access to the laptop being a qualifier, I’m going to do my best to write something while the vertigo is kicking my ass. I’m going to do this because this blog is for me as well as for you, dear reader. It might be handy to be able to go back and check how bad the bad really was.
This time the vertigo popped right in the middle of the heroic Azshara raid boss fight my current raiding group has been working on for the better part of two weeks. It looked like we might have a good chance of getting her down this week, but I kept getting dizzier and dizzier and missing prompts to go here and there as the mechanics of the fight require.
Just too much screen movement for a day that the eyes want to pretend that the world is spinning around my head. I had to bow out and leave them to their work. Hopefully they did better not burdened by my inability to deal with so much motion on the screen. It’s taken two hours to get the spinning down to the point where I can sit in my adjustable bed and type this simple entry up.
I don’t know how many actual spells I’ve had this year, which is why I’m going to start trying to do this each time I have one. I know it’s the first one in October because it’s still the first week of October, or was until yesterday. But I had at least two in September, ditto in August and it was even worse in July. June wasn’t too bad but that was when the light dizziness really seemed to kick in, May leading into June, and I can’t figure out what is causing this constant near-nausea inducing dislocation and disorientation on a daily basis. It is maddening.
I’m getting blood tests done for allergies this time, betahistine will interfere with the skin tests and I’m not willing to stay off it for a week. I’ve also started some training in vestibular therapy while I’m in physical therapy for lower back pain. I’ll write more on that subject when I know more about it. I just want the dizzy to GO AWAY. But it won’t. So I’ll medicate it away when I have to.
October 9th – Still recovering from the vertigo last night. I’m going to miss two raids this week. Can’t be helped. I’m almost in a vegetative state today.
