I haven’t been admitted to a hospital in 25 years. I have been in an emergency room twice, I think, once for a broken pinkie and once for a medication-induced “cardiac incident”. And now a third time.
Around 3 a.m. one morning, I woke up because I was dreaming that the room was spinning. Weird, right? When I opened my eyes, I got the rude awakening that it wasn’t just a dream.
If you have ever experienced vertigo, you know it’s panic inducing. Your environment moves in ways you are not, and most of the time you have no idea why. And no idea how to stop it. If you are lucky, it goes away on its own.
I was not lucky. And since I live with chronic nausea, I had a (not the good kind of) funny feeling I knew where this was going. Three hours passed where I only managed to prop myself on a reading pillow (so I wouldn’t aspirate when I couldn’t keep myself from throwing up). The vertigo was not lessening, and vomiting can be dangerous for diabetics because of ketoacidosis. I finally had to admit that my body wasn’t going to move on without help.
So, for the first time in my life, I called an ambulance for myself.
All in all, it wasn’t a bad visit. I was treated quickly and slept mostly while they ruled out possible scary causes, like kidney or brain things. After I proved to myself that I could eat without consequence and that I could toddle about ten feet without falling over, the docs deemed me (with my agreement) ready to go home.
It took almost a week, but I finally feel like I won’t do any damage if I get behind the wheel of a car. You know it’s a weird day when brushing your teeth and showering without falling over is at the top of the accomplishments list.
This was an unusual, but not unexpected event. Chronic patients live in a state of perpetual expectation – that their condition will flare up, they might develop a new symptom, their medication will no longer be available, or anything in between.
It bothers me that I still don’t know what caused this. With all my conditions and their symptoms, once I get through an event, I can prepare for it to happen again. I can equip myself so I don’t need help next time.
I actually think that’s what bothers me most about having to call for help – that I couldn’t fix it myself.
I have lived alone since I was a junior in college. It has never been an issue. I have always handled my episodes, routine or not, by myself. Those couple of times I went to the ER before now were concrete and ended with the visit or shortly after.
Not this time.
Apparently, vertigo is caused by the displacement of the crystals in your inner ear (did you know there are crystals in your inner ear?). They either get knocked loose and float free or they get stuck on a gel-like structure called the cupula. The circumstances that loosen the crystals could be anything.
The ER eliminated the big, obvious causes. That leaves me with a list of less obvious, but still logical possibilities. Or something completely different.
I don’t like unsolved mysteries, especially when they are associated with my body.
This could happen again and there is no way for me to treat it myself or shore up one of my conditions to prevent it. I have the medications with which they treated me, but experience says I may not be able to use them if the vertigo makes me sick. It could be IV only, in which case, I will not be self-administering. (Some chronic patients do, but that isn’t, and never will be, me.)
This is going to bug me. An (inner) ear worm that’s just out of reach.
It will take another incident at the very least to get any answers. Even I don’t think another run through vertigo is not worth satisfying my inner control freak. For now, I am just going to have to accept that there is nothing I can do about this, cause or incident or treatment.
I hate that.