BVVP

Saturday morning I woke up for the usual 2:30am uh… pitstop, and went back to sleep as usual. When I woke up “for good” at 7:30, I knew something was off. It wasn’t Ivy’s insistence that “the sun is awake… stop sleeping!” (where is that same kid that sleeps through my work-weekday 6am alarms??). It wasn’t the relief of being able to sleep in. It was… well, I felt weird lying in bed. When I sat up, though, the weirdness manifest itself quite clearly. The room was spinning.

Vertigo: Not just for Hitchcock thrillers!

This is not something I’d felt hardly ever before in my life. Maybe after being on a spinning carnival ride, but otherwise, nope. I tried walking and it was like God was tilting the earth under my feet. Even with my eyes closed. Even while “focussing on the horizon” (a technique I used when scuba diving to combat seasickness on dinghies). Nope, my head was telling me the world was a gigantic swing, lurching to and fro unpredictably.

I stumbled around a bit, feeling OK except for the uncertain footwork, and made it out to the living room. Sitting still long enough alleviated the wooziness, but standing up, turning my head or doing anything other than looking straight ahead brought it all back to me. And now the constant dizziness was making me feel pukey, too. So, of course I turned to Facebook.

A few folks replied, and the one ddx that seemed to fit best is BVVP. I was born with messed up ears, so this doesn’t surprise me. Someone recommended I try an Epley Maneuver, and I did.

That did the trick, but let me tell you, the part where you turn to look at the ground, oh wow. I could FEEL my eyeballs spinning, trying to compensate for the mixed messages in my head. That pretty much wiped me out and I took a 3-hour nap afterwards. I felt groggy the rest of the day from so much lying around (not exactly what I had hoped for when on Friday I wanted to take it easy for the weekend), but come Sunday I’m just fine.

So anyhow, looks like there are little flakes of annoyance in my ears to look out for. Let’s hope this was a one-off, because I don’t ever want to deal with that again!