Not quite brain dead

The neurologist was everything I'd expected but not quite what I had hoped for. I knew I was setting myself up for disappointment. How could I not? I've been waiting since October for this appointment. It's no big surprise I built up some expectations during these long months of wondering if this person would (a) diagnose my vestibular malady accurately, (b) have a remedy, and (c) give it to me without lollygagging. 

I showed up with my stack of paperwork, hoping I'd followed all the directions properly: no food for at least four hours prior to the appointment, no coffee, no opioids. Ha. I paid my copays, stomach growling, and waited until I was called. 

Before I was allowed into the neurologist's inner sanctum, I had to endure an hour of vestibular tests similar to the ones I had at the October ENT visits but more violent. A perky young woman with long flat blonde hair briskly outfitted me with heavy goggles that were supposed to measure my eye movements. I sat on the edge of the exam table and held on as she grabbed my head in both hands and proceeded to jerk my head up and down, side to side, hard and fast. 

The purpose of this uncomfortable test (which cost me $100 because insurance doesn't cover it) was to see how much my eyes jiggled around as she upset the crystals in my ear canals. After a while, I felt like my neck was snapping, but I didn't come close to barfing. They keep trying, but I've been living on a boat (in my head) for years. I don't get seasick anymore. Plus, my stomach was empty. 

After a long tedious session, she freed me from the goggles. As I tried to regain eyelid function, she looked at the computer monitor showing a close-up of my half-open eyes, caught in a moment of misery, and said, "I saw a few small anomalies."

I waited for her to elaborate. She did not. She sent me back to wait in the hall for the main event, my session with the neurologist. At last I was ushered into a messy office dominated by a big wooden L-shaped desk. I sat in one of the two visitor chairs. She asked me to describe my experience, and when I did, she interrupted every few words with staccato questions. "What does that mean? When did that start? Can you be more precise?"

I tried my best. At one point, I felt myself choking up. Finally, someone was listening to me! I mean, someone who wasn't one of my long-suffering friends. I said, "I told myself I would not cry."

She said, "Go ahead and cry. People often do. Do you have a recent audiology test?"

"You have all my records," I said. "They were scanned a few weeks ago."

She glanced at the stack of paper on her desk. "I never look at them."

I opened the envelope of originals I had brought with me, thinking I bought a cheap Walmart printer just to print out all these records for you, can I kill you now? Lucky for her, my hands were busy searching through the stack of paper. It took a while, possibly because I was having caffeine withdrawals, but I finally located the two hearing tests and handed them over. 

"I'll have my assistant make copies of these," she said. "Follow me."

She had me walk up and down a narrow hallway in various postures: one foot in front of the other, like I was being tested for a DUI. Same thing, eyes closed. Stand on one foot, then the other, then again, with eyes closed. Sometimes I fell to the right, sometimes to the left. Each time, I caught myself against the wall, feeling like a clumsy idiot and wondering if I was passing or failing. 

"Let's go into the exam room."

I followed her tall chunky figure, grudgingly admiring her colorful swirly dress. I don't remember her footwear but I am sure she wore flats. She moved way too quickly and quietly to be wearing heels. Her movements indicated she'd seen a long procession of patients before me. Like, years and years of patients, all no doubt weeping and barfing as they fumbled through her tests. Not a motion was wasted. 

She sat me on the exam table. Then, oh no. More goggles! More head grabbing and jerking and shaking, plus lots of other tests involving eye tracking. And some of the basics. Moving fast, she tested my reflexes, looked in my ears, and listened to my heart. I saw her do a double-take. "Do you know you have an irregular heartbeat?"

I explained what I could about my wimpy case of aortic stenosis.

"I'm going to call your cardiologist. Okay? Now for the hyperventilation test," she said. "Breathe in and out of your mouth, fast, for forty seconds." My neck was starting to wilt with the weight of the goggles, but I held onto the table and gamely started panting like an old dog on a hot day. Pretty soon I was feeling lighter than air, but I kept at it, thinking if I pass out, let's see if she will catch me before I crack my head on the edge of the table. If I survive, I might get rich. "Don't worry, I'm watching the clock," she said at one point. I didn't believe her. My throat started feeling raw. I coughed but kept panting. A memory surfaced of hyperventilating with friends. How old was I? Old enough to know better. 

Finally, she stopped me, took off the goggles, and pointed to the computer monitor. "Your eyes are steady as a rock. You don't have vestibular paroxysmia."

"Really."

"I think you have BPPV in a hard-to-treat ear canal, which is why the Epley never worked well for you. And I think you have vestibular migraines. I want you to get some bloodwork. We have a lab here, if that is convenient."

I could hardly feel my feet as I staggered to the wing that held the lab. My brain was sizzling. I put my name on the sign-up list outside the door, and then saw the sign: out to lunch, back at 1:30. I looked at my phone. Barely past 12:30. Argh. I stood there debating. All I wanted was coffee and food, but who wants to go through all that fasting again? I decided to wait. It was only an hour. Surely I'd reached my misery quota for the day. I found a chair in the mostly empty waiting room outside the lab and the pain management clinic, spread out my stuff, and proceeded to feel sorry for myself.

Eventually the phlebotemist returned. She poked me in a vein and drew many vials of blood. I lost count after eight. I was feeling pretty crappy at that point. Now I get why they have those adult-sized high chairs with the padded bar across the front. Just as I was thinking, bye bye, she yanked out the needle, gave me some water, and sent me on my way.

So there you have it. Apparently the tests do not lie, even when the diagnoses don't match my list of symptoms (although some studies have suggested about 60% of the hyperventilation tests are wrong). Of course, it is possible I have more than one illness. I'm willing to consider the BPPV diagnosis. I think the vestibular migraine diagnosis is misguided. I still think I have a case of vestibular paroxysmia. My symptoms fit, and the MRA shows that it is possible. 

Meanwhile, I have a referral to a vestibular physical therapist and yet another migraine diet handout. 

I'm going to try, I'm really going to try. I'll go to the PT. I'll let them twirl and bend me. I'll do the eye exercises. I'll eat twigs but no more nuts. No raisins, no citrus, no onions, no tomatoes. And in a few months, if I don't feel better, I will go back and beg for one of the drugs I saw on her list of medications, several of which were antiseizure medications often prescribed for vestibular paroxysmia. We'll see who wins in the end.

Going round the bend

Today I heard someone on a video meeting casually express an interest in moving to another city, as if that were normal, natural, and doable. As if everyone were doing it, or had done it, or will do it at some point in the future. I didn't hear any angst in their voice. Instead, I heard a sense of excitement, as if a move was an impending adventure. The exciting part, it sounded like, was the mystery of the move. Where might I go, they mused. I could go anywhere!

Hearing this person talk about moving in such a positive, almost nonchalant way made me think perhaps I've been overthinking my city search. Maybe it's not the problem I'm making it out to be. Maybe it's a grand and intriguing mystery.  

What if choosing a new city to live in really could be an adventure?

I don't know what criteria the person was applying to help them narrow down their choices. Me, my criteria are pretty simple: clean, safe, affordable, AC and heat, and internet. Oh, a place to park would be good. A lot of cities and towns meet my criteria. It's not like I'm asking for a hot tub and a butler. 

A few minutes ago, while I was doomscrolling on a social media channel, I was presented with a video about hermit crabs exchanging shells. The gist was that even if the shell you end up with is too small, too dingy, and has a hole in it, you'd better take it, because having a crummy shell is better than having no shell at all. Homelessness is fatal for a hermit crab. The last hermit crab in the shell exchange skulked into the defective shell, looking somewhat embarrassed and demoralized at failing to have scored something better. Was it too slow? Should it have put its name on a waitlist sooner, even before seeing the shell?

Wait, what? Am I talking about me or am I talking about a hermit crab? The lines are somewhat blurred these days. Is confusion really a state of grace? More like evidence of dementia.

I've been trying to come up with metaphors to explain the doings in my head. The latest metaphor is a little complicated. 

Imagine you are immersed in a big bucket of gunky water that is just over your head. Sometimes your feet touch the bottom of the bucket, but most of the time you are floating with your nose above the water. Now picture a toy train running on a track past your gunky bucket. It's a small town, so the train goes by your bucket every minute or so. Here's the fun part. Every time the train goes by, some bored kid reaches out the train window and slaps the side of your bucket. 

You don't have time to curse the kid because you are busy for the next ten or fifteen seconds trying to maintain your equilibrium in the sloshing bucket. The water slams you this way and that, up and down, from side to side. It's all you can do to stay upright and not go under. Sometimes you do go under. You feel pressure moving through your sinuses in uneven waves as you fight for your balance. While this is going on, your right ear crackles. That's the train whistle. Whoo whoo! 

Finally, the water begins to settle. You start to feel a little more normal. The crackling din in your right ear fades to silence. You resume whatever you were doing before the bucket started sloshing. 

A minute later, the train comes around the track again, and that stupid kid slaps the side of your bucket. Whoo whoo! 

This scenario describes what is happening in my head. I'm normally a pretty calm person, but I'd kill that kid if I could, just saying.

I find it difficult to maintain my focus when the train is roaring through the station in my head, upsetting the bucket and tipping my ear into bedlam. I have to admit, the noise and pressure get to me sometimes. At times, I feel like ramming a pencil into my ear, just to see what would happen, sort of a DIY tympanoplasty. The bubbly ENT I saw last year suggested we try that as a remedy for the crackling, even though it probably wouldn't work, she said, and insurance wouldn't cover it, and it would hurt like hell. 

Maybe it would hurt, but maybe it would relieve the pressure and muffle the crackling. Pain could be a pathway into something else. Probably more pain, but maybe it would at least be quiet. I really crave solitude and silence. 

How much of my physical disability is factoring into my desire to move to someplace small, slow, and quiet? Where's the adventure in this? I'm not seeing it right now but I'm sure it's here somewhere.

It's all about balance

I sense some sort of adventure is lurking over the horizon. Right now, I'm too tired to chase it, but I think it is close by. I hope once the iron pills kick in, I will have a little more ambition. And color. My friend S said I'm pale. I thought it was just my Zoom lighting. It's important to look good even if you don't feel good. I learned that from my father. Nobody cares how you feel, but everyone cares about how you look. Thanks for everything, Pop. I'd give you back your funky heart valve if I could.

Speaking of looking good, I'm glad my housemate is back, and I'm really glad E didn't have to witness my week of starvation prep for the procedure, now two weeks in my hindmost of rear view mirrors. Some things are better suffered in solitude, massive liquid diarrhea explosions being one of them. It wasn't just a wild goose chase up a colon with a camera. They did find something that might account for my iron anemia. Biopsies indicate it is something benevolent, but it's unclear what if anything comes next, besides take iron pills. 

The heart thing had me a little worried, I admit. However, after a chat with my primary care person, I've feel reassured I can live with this, whatever this is, at least for the immediate future. The cardiologist isn't precisely sure what he's working with (am I a two-leafer or a three-leafer? We need another test to tell for sure). That will happen in November. Another IV. Ho hum. 

In any case, I'm over it. All of it. I'm over everything. I just wish I could regain some equilibrium and get the hissing in my ear to stop, but maybe it's all just part of the new balancing act I'm being called to execute, now that I'm officially old. 

I've never been good at balancing. In high school we had to do a couple weeks of gymnastics, which included torture sessions on various intimidating pieces of equipment. The parallel bars, the horse thing, the mini-horse, what did we call that little thing, the Shetland pony? I can't remember. And of course, the balance beam. I was terrible at all of it. I had no strength, no grace, and most of all, no gumption. About all I could manage was a respectable handstand. I've never had any poise. From elementary school onward, gym class was endless humiliation and embarrassment. 

It hasn't improved with adulthood. I used to be able to run, well, jog, let's be clear. I was never a sprinter. I liked to think I had potential as a long distance runner, but I lacked discipline. I didn't care enough to train rigorously. I ran one marathon, slowly, and called it good. Now I can barely trot twenty yards before my heart is hammering and my lungs are wheezing. Maybe when the iron pills kick in . . . 

I'm dwelling on all this because I just had a birthday. Fall is a time of reflection, and having a fall birthday invites self-reflection. My self-reflection does not include mirrors but it does include a hefty dose of self-criticism. I am not used to thinking of myself as a sick person. Even though I have never been graceful (my sister was the ballet dancer and figure skater, not me. I played softball and volleyball), I never thought of myself as physically weak. Emotionally frayed, yes, but I could always throw a ball if I had to. Now I have to find a new equilibrium. I don't know how close I can get to the cliff edge before I fall into the abyss. I used to walk that cliff edge, metaphorically speaking. Now I can't see it because my eyes are filming over with cataracts. I can't hear the hiss of empty air over the hiss of my dysfunctional Eustachian tube. I can't even enjoy chewing my food from fear that osteoporosis and bisphosphonates have given me necrosis in my jaw. 

You are probably thinking, oh, what's the use? Why do we keep going when it is so obviously futile and fatal? Right, I get you. It's all about balance. When the heart isn't pounding, when my ear isn't crackling, when my eyes are closed, and I'm leaning securely against something so I won't fall over, I can feel the cold evening desert air coming in the bathroom window. Today it was so humid, I almost thought I could smell the ocean. 

You know what parts of the U.S. have the least amount of air pressure fluctuation? Along the southern coasts at sea level. Southern California, southern Florida. One of these days it will be time for a road trip. As soon as the iron pills kick in. 

Living on the edge with a notebook on my head

I'm sitting at the computer with a notebook balanced flat on my head to remind me to sit still. It's another ploy to defeat the vertigo that drives the waves that set off the crackling in my right ear. Apparently I move my head around a lot and that upsets the ear crystals. It's harder than you might think to stay perfectly upright. Plus it hurts when the notebook slides off my head and hits my hands. As a preteen, I used to mince across the bedroom with a book perched on my head. (It's what girls did in the early 1960s before they got the message that love was free and didn't require poise.) This is not that. Maybe a neck brace would be better. However, I don't happen to have one, and I know from experience, wrapping a long scarf tightly around my neck is not an ideal solution.

Speaking of breathing, yesterday I went for a walk in the park after visiting my sleeping mother. I've avoided the park, mostly, because I want to avoid people. But I'm tired of wandering the neighborhood. I wanted to see my reservoir. I donned my plaid mask like a good citizen, jammed in my mp3 player's ear buds, and hiked into the park. I saw dozens of people, and not one was wearing a mask. Maybe they all feel invincible in the outdoor air? Maybe I'm the overly cautious canary?

Amazingly, no one was on the trail through the trees. I had the 87°F shade all to myself. Early summer is a luscious green season here in Portland. I came down the hill above the tennis courts and saw all three courts occupied with players. No masks, but some nice social distancing going on, okay (nods in approval). When I came out into the sun by the big reservoir, I saw a some people strolling, a few running, but fewer than I had anticipated. I saw not one wearing a mask.

Excuse me, time out while I remove my suddenly chirping smoke detector from the ceiling. I may have ear troubles but I'm not deaf. Oh darn, I don't have a replacement battery. I guess for a few days I'll be living on the edge. Oh well, aren't we all. Hold on while I put the notebook back on my head. There.

Where was I? Oh yeah, walking around the reservoir, contemplating the nature of virus particles. How many times have you passed someone on the street or in the hallway and held your breath so you didn't inhale their perfume? Or their body odor, halitosis, farts, whatever cloud they left in their wake? Come on, you probably do it instinctively. It's a social-dissociative mannerism adopted to help us maintain our personal bubble and the illusion of safety. 

I did the same in the park yesterday. I passed a chubby shirtless tanned man walking his bicycle. I passed a man and woman, obviously a couple, who walked shoulder to shoulder. I passed two young women walking while looking at their phones, ignoring the beautiful reservoir mere feet away. I passed several people walking dogs, singly and in small family groups. After I passed each person or group, I held my breath to avoid inhaling their perfume plumes, covid clouds, and fart mists. 

I walked three times around instead of my usual four because it was getting dark and the wind had kicked up. Low pressure was moving in. I could tell because my vertigo was cranking up. I think I'm going to start a local weather blog. Are you interested in checking the weather in a small region, say, a ten foot diameter circle around me? Great. I'll just access my right ear. Currently, the weather around me is medium crappy. That means, it's not raining, but it's not sunny, either. It's medium crappy. I think tomorrow high pressure will build in and the hiss in my ear will lessen. 

Wow, holding your neck in one position is really hard on the back. Sadly, it doesn't seem to be helping much with the vertigo waves, either. So much for that remedy. My best option is still to immerse my head in a hot tub of water. It's very difficult to do that outside the tub, though. I've tried. Big mess.

Mom sleeps most of the time, less like a napping cat and more like a soon-to-be dead person. When I visit in the evening, she is always sprawled loosely on her couch. Sometimes her mouth is open. Sometimes she twitches. Once she took her life-alert pendant and wrapped the ribbon around her hand quite neatly without opening her eyes. A few times lately, her TV has been on. Last night someone had turned on her air conditioner. 

I talk into the baby monitor: Hi Mom, howdy, Mom, Mom, Mom, wake up, Mom, it's me at the window, look, Mom, it's me. I watch and wait. I try again. Wake up, Sleeping Beauty, Mom, Ma, Ma, Mommy, wake up. Sometimes she'll twitch. Rarely does she open her eyes. Sometimes I sing, but I don't yell. It seems cruel to make her wake up just to entertain me. If I were her, I would prefer to sleep through to the end. I stand at the window, a morose peeping tom, and watch her chest rise and fall. Proof of life.

Exit-seeking, stage right

These days it seems as if the only words I find are platitudes: When it rains it pours. Well, it's either feast or famine. Well, you know, if it's not this, it would be something else. Sometimes you are the windshield . . . har, har, har. So far in 2020, I'm definitely not the windshield. I thought I'd melt from sadness when my cat died in January. Then along came the Covid, followed by the protests. Big stuff, hard stuff. Now guess who's back? My vertigo. And along with the vertigo, an unwelcome pest I had hoped never to hear again—the incessant ear clicking. The jack hammer in my head is going at it like flash bang grenades down at the Justice Center. I'm currently seeking the nearest exit, which right now is looking like a sharp pencil in my right ear. 

Yesterday I visited Mom as usual, lurking outside her apartment window in the azalea bush, waving at her and holding up signs. It's plenty warm enough to have the window open, but last week I got read the riot act by the Med Aide on duty. The window was open one inch but even standing at the window, Mom couldn't hear me. I pulled my mask down so she could see my lips. “Did you have some ice cream?” I called. At that moment, the Med Aide came in the room.

“No more open window!” she shouted, hustling over to my mother.

“Where are her hearing aids?” I yelled back. “She wants ice cream!”

The Med Aide looked around in confusion and found them. “Oh, the caregiver must have forgotten to put them back after her shower.” She sat Mom down on the couch and inserted the hearing aids into Mom's ears. She stood up to leave.

 I yelled, “Close the window! And get some ice cream!”

So yesterday evening, I visited Mom as usual and brought my little sketchpad of prepared signs and a felt-tipped Sharpie in case I needed to write some more. She came to the window to open it. I held up a sign explaining that we can't open the window because we are trying to keep all the old folks safe from germs. She shrugged. Who cares. She lost interest and went back to sit on the couch. Her dinner looked barely touched. I yelled, “I love you!” through the window. She gave me two peace signs, and I left.

Shortly after I got home, my phone rang in the special tone: Trouble. Oh dear, I thought. Did she fall? Did she crack her head open? Is she dead? Is this over?

“Today your mother went out the front door.” Same Med Aide.

“Uh-oh,” I said, thinking, right on, Ma.

“Yeah, she was very angry and combative. And she didn't have her walker. She made it outside but one of the staff was outside walking with another resident. She stopped your mother and brought her back inside.”

This news was a blow but not a surprise. A few nights ago, the nurse had told me, Mom was up early in the morning, making a run for the front door. Mom said she had to go home. My sister is my witness. We were video chatting when the nurse called. 

Looks like I'm not the only one looking for a way out. Poor old Ma. My next thought: poor old me. 

We come up with remedies to cope with our problems. To remedy the Geiger counter in my ear, I'm just about ready to call the witch doctor and sacrifice a chicken. I've tried everything short of personally performing aural surgery with a sharp stick. For a few minutes, usually after eating, the clicks fade and diminish. I don't know if that means the ear infection is easing or if I'm going deaf in my right ear or if I should just keep eating and never stop. At this point, I don't care. I'd do just about anything to keep the blessed silence. 

In Mom's case, the remedies are lame, because the underlying problem is she is going to die. There's no solution to that problem. We redirect. We cajole. Well, we don't actually do anything, because we don't get to see her anymore except from outside her window, like she's a fish in a tank. The care staff at the nursing home are her family now. They know her better than I do. I see her for two minutes every evening. I don't see her in the middle of the night bolting for the front door, yelling that she has to go home.

All we can do is agree to put a Lo-Jack on her and let her go down swinging. 

Those who can't . . . teach

I spent almost ten years teaching business and general education courses to reluctant, resistant, and recalcitrant adult learners, many of whom attended school only for the student loan money they lived on. I used my time as a teacher to learn the craft and earn the advanced degree I now regret pursuing. Teaching was fun. I relished the challenge of organizing my approach to communicate material that most students would briefly absorb then promptly forget. I strove to create handouts, worksheets, templates, rubrics, guidebooks, cartoons, board games, dice games, role-play games, whatever it took to jam information into their heads that would stick long enough for them to pass the finals and graduate. It wasn't easy. Students often slept in class. They texted and played Farmville. They cheated on tests. They ignored me. They didn't read the textbook or do the practice exams. Many of my blog posts from 2012 and 2013 are stories of my angst and frustration with students.

It's happened again. I am now officially a teacher. Recently I taught two sessions of a day-long class for artists who want to learn some business skills. This time the format was continuing education, which meant no tests, no lectures, no jamming and cramming, no grading. This time, my students were artists.

Artists are the greatest. I love artists, probably more than I love art. Art is great, but once it's on the wall, it is done, it's over. Artists carry an endearing combination of creative confidence and urgent desperation. They make art with faith and trust in their ability to enter the zone, the flow. They know exactly what that zone is and regally assume their right to enter it. However, when it comes to bringing their art into the world, to show it, to sell it, to price it, it's like half their brain has gone missing. They are lobotomized by the prospect of applying business tools to their creative lives. They can't find the balance between creating art and marketing art. It makes them insane, timid, angry, anxious, resentful, all in the course of one discussion about whether we should make the art we want and then find a market for it, or whether we should seek a market and then produce art for that market. Yowza!

The day was long, split in two by a leisurely lunch hour. The students were attentive and eager, until we reached the point in the discussion about including financial statements in the business plan. Then they all entered their own private hell. I know this from the student feedback forms I collected at the end of the class. What is it about artists and business? Oil and water is trite but apt.

At one point in the pricing discussion, after much debate about how to price a painting, one older woman said, “What about that thing that artists bring, our creativity, shouldn't that be added in, shouldn't we get something for that?”

“Because we're so special and unique, you mean?”

“Well, yes.”

“If you can convince your buyer of that, then yes,” I said. “If people want what you are selling and can afford it, they will pay for it. Your job is to persuade them that your painting is worth that extra premium.”

“Well, what if they don't want to pay for that special extra thing, the . . . muse?”

“Then you don't sell the painting.”

“But shouldn't they understand that artists are different from . . . I don't know, ditch diggers?”

“Do you mean, buyers should give you something extra just because you are an artist?”

I could see other people nodding. I could feel myself nodding. The story of my life.

“Boy, wouldn't that be great? To be recognized for our creativity and compensated for it?” I sighed. “Art buyers might buy your painting because they think you are special. But mainly they are concerned with their own needs and wants. How will that painting make them feel? How will having one of your paintings boost their self-esteem? You need to convince them that your work is worth whatever price you are charging.”

I could see they were still dissatisfied. Some part of their artistic souls still thought they should have what they want, when they want it. They didn't want to do any work to get it, beyond making the art. Making the art should be adequate. They thought recognition, wealth, and fame should be theirs by divine right, apparently, simply because they were the artist and the buyer was not.

Finding the balance between the practical brain and the creative brain is the quest of the serious artist. We know we have to play by certain rules to bring our art into the world—that is why these artists enrolled in my class. But they still couldn't help complaining about the unfairness of having to think about things like marketing and selling, financial statements and business licenses.

Oh poor us, poor artists, woe is us, alas, alackaday. For those of us who haven't figured it out, it's easy to retreat to the hothouse and wait for someone else to administer the fertilizer, preferably in the form of big checks with no restrictions. And for those of us who still haven't figured it and who have all but given up, there's always teaching.

Happy anniversary to my vertigo: a year of imbalance

Just over a year ago, I woke up one morning with a new companion: Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV) or just plain old vertigo. I leaned over to pick up a sock. Suddenly I felt like I was being hurled violently toward the ceiling, then back at the floor, then back at the ceiling. I quickly sat down and assessed the situation. Earthquake? No. Bus crash into the Love Shack? Nope. Had I somehow been dumped on a trampoline while I was sleeping? Nope. Conclusion: a localized disturbance has infiltrated my inner ears—aka, vertigo. Bummer!

For most people afflicted with vertigo, the cause is unknown. After doing some research online, I hypothesized that the ear crystals (ocotonia) in my middle ear canals had somehow come loose from their usual location (possibly from banging my head against the door jamb of my mother's car) and were now freely gallivanting around the canals on an extended sightseeing tour. Fun for my ear crystals, I presume; not so fun for me. As the ear rocks swirled, my sensitive ear nerves told me that up was down and down was up. The floor was spongy like a trampoline. I was flying!

Walking without falling over became a challenge. The inside of my head quivered constantly. In the beginning, before I learned how to live with the vertigo, I felt shaky and weak. People who saw me said I looked pale and ill.

Of course, I scoured the web resources for information. I read some disheartening tales: vertigo could last days, weeks, months, or years. Luckily, the type I had was subjective BPPV, not objective. That meant I felt like I was doing the moving, rather than feeling like the world was doing the moving. (The difference between the two is profound.) I learned about the Epley Maneuver, which uses head positions and gravity to entice the crystals to return to their proper location. I started treating myself in an amateur fashion several times an hour, desperately seeking a cure.

During the first month of my affliction, I visited a doctor, who said there were some exercises I could do to desensitize my ear nerves and gave me a referral to an ENT. The ENT put me in a space chair, twirled me over and around, and sent me out dizzier than I'd come in. Clearly, there would be no easy cure for me. I've come to believe I actually have roving ear rocks in both ears, which makes it more difficulty to treat with a gravity-based maneuver.

Sleeping was a challenge. Lying flat on my back caused waves of pressure to roil through my head. I could map the ocean of fluid in my ears as the waves sloshed slowly back and forth, front and back. I was on a boat, but the boat was in my head, rocking on waves that scraped the inside of my forehead like surf on a rocky coastline. The waves felt loud, but were silent, like a wall of soundless air pressure lacking actual decibels. I couldn't make out any noise, but I was bludgeoned every time I tilted my head back even slightly. (No more crying to heaven for me.) Sleeping on my side after performing the Epley on my head seemed to help. I confess, I wasn't willing to sleep sitting upright for the 48 hours recommended by some practitioners.

Over the summer, I fought the vertigo by staying active, determined to outlast it. I went running to spite it. I found out jogging was more comfortable than walking. I guessed that jogging kept the crystals floating above the nerves; they came back down with a vengeance soon after I slowed to a walk. As fall swept in, I stopped running, and then stopped walking. As the air got colder, I didn't want to move much, because movement stirred the sludge in my ears.

Winter came; my vertigo and I reached an uneasy truce. I agreed not to move, and it subsided to a dull but silent roar. There were a few good days interspersed with the tedious unbalanced days. The trampoline walk gradually calmed. As the months went by, I gained some weight, but I began to think maybe the vertigo was starting to fade.

Enter this spring. Almost a year to the day I first felt the vertigo symptoms, I suddenly was back in the rocking boat. Surfs up!

The ocean in my head has been active these past few weeks. My hope is that this activity means the winter sludge in my ears has finally broken up, like Arctic ice in the spring, and the crystalline icebergs in my ears are on the move. I do the Epley whenever the symptoms threaten to swamp me. I hope the waves are starting to calm. They are intense, but don't last as long, leading me to imagine fewer crystals are touring my ear canals. I wish the cruise would finally end, but like any cruise, you get on and you don't get off till it's over.

I've tried to frame this year as a metaphor for the imbalance of my life, but after a while, day after day, it's hard to buy in to the notion that things are any more precarious than usual. The same conundrums plague me; maybe by now they've lost their capsizing potential. Mom lives. I struggle. Life goes on, tra la la. If my metaphysical imbalance were responsible for my vertigo, it ought to have dissipated by now, because after a while imbalance becomes the new normal.

Vertigo doesn't have to mean anything, symbolically speaking. Last year, I hit my head on a car door jamb, which probably knocked loose some ocotonia, which settled into sludge in my inner ear over the winter. Gradually, my body will assimilate the annoying little travelers. Eventually, most likely, the cruise will end. The ocotonia will head back to port and stay there, and I'll be able to do things other people do, like lean forward and backward. Like sleeping flat on my back. Like dancing (when no one is watching, of course) and jogging and walking... things I used to take for granted, not realizing how precious they were.

Untethered

For the past three years or so, I turned to this blog for comfort and solace, the way desperate people siphon the will to go on from therapists, counselors, and friends. I could almost always find the rain cloud of black humor floating above my head, even in my darkest moments. Rarely was I at a loss for words. However, over the past year, as my focus has dissipated, my reading audience has dwindled to a handful of stalwart fans and some spammers who slap me with encouraging comments (keep up the good work!) as they squat and deposit stinky links leading back to their nefarious products. For the first time ever, I removed some comments! I don't know what that signifies. I don't really care. I'm depressed.

I'm in free fall. Slo mo free fall. I'm detached from everything except my distaste for life. I know things are bad when I take myself so seriously I can't find the joke. I've lost my mojo and now it's slow mo free fall to an as yet unknown destination that probably resembles something flat like a sidewalk. Ugh. Too messy. No, I'm not suicidal, but I definitely want out of this messy bog.

I feel like I'm on yet another annoying precarious edge overlooking yet another stupid abyss. I'm cranky as hell. Why? Thanks for asking. My friend Bravadita is fighting breast cancer, battling insurance companies and doctors with her bare hands. My brilliant sister is on the verge of financial ruin, even as she treads the rues of Paris. My mother is disintegrating, shedding her sense of self, a few memory cells at a time. I can't fix any of it.

I'm trapped in self-centered fear. My inability to earn enough to cover my expenses makes the last 20 years of recovery seem like a stupid pointless mirage. I suspect I should have turned left (into finance and accounting or maybe computer programming) instead of right (into art and teaching). That crossroads came and went years ago, no use in whining now, I know. Alas, alackaday.

To top it all off, it's fall, which always brings me closer to the edge of despair. The slant of the watery sun prods me toward hibernation, as if that were actually a solution. Is it possible to go to ground until spring? Perhaps, through the magic of the Internet and UPS. Everything is harder in winter: the frosty ground, the wind-whipped air, my blue-tinged cuticles, my sluggish blood. Okay, now I'm starting to really wallow. Look at me, I'm rolling in it from side to side. Ahhhhhh.

I admit, I miss this, this self-centered whining. Where else can one say the ridiculously egotistical, embarrassingly selfish things that need to said? I guess it's good my audience has dwindled to mostly auto-bot spammers. I would feel just slightly less inclined to whine if I thought people were reading this drivel. I feel fortunate my mother cannot find her way to this blog.

I was challenged this week to honor my creativity. Somewhere in me an artist still lurks, but she's been hibernating, mostly, for about 15 years. She surfaces now and then, in this blog, for example. She sleepwalked through graduate school. She dreams of days when creating was a compulsion, as essential as food. These days, creativity is a dry-bones memory of a once-verdant shelter. Parched. Hemmed in by clutter and white-knuckled fear.

I'm waiting. Waiting to find out if Bravadita will survive. Waiting to see what solution my sister will conjure out of the rich European ether. Waiting for my mother to decide how she wants to live until she dies. Waiting for spring. Waiting for the miracle to inspire me to stop the self-seeking long enough to feel something besides despair and resignation. Hope is a real thing, I know this in my brain. But my heart is disconnected. Untethered. Falling.

Dog days

Now that the maternal parental unit is ensconced in her new digs, I have been waiting for the other shoe to drop. It would be too easy if all the stress was over. Finally, on Wednesday the family grapevine lit up: Mom thinks she's had a stroke. Naturally, my first thought is, after all we've done for you, you go and strokes out? True to form, I can make anything, even someone else's disastrous health problem, all about me.

Being carless, I waited on the phone rather than rushing (which would consist of walking or riding a bus) over to the retirement community, as if my presence would solve anything. It sounded like a crowded bus station through the phone: my brother's wife Deanna, a family friend Shirlene who is a nurse, and in the background, my mother's voice, loud and clear. That is not the voice of a stroke victim, I thought to myself, as Shirlene offered to come get me and drive me over to Mom's. Because somehow it was assumed I would want to be there to add my two cents to the pandemonium.

I declined the ride and walked over after I finished eating my breakfast. You can't tackle old senile mothers on an empty stomach. When I got there, everyone else was gone and Mom was snoozing on the couch. She woke up when I opened the door (I have a key).

“Shirlene said I was dehydrated,” she said with a little smirk.

I did my typical eye roll.

“I'm waiting for the cable guy,” she said. “I've been waiting all afternoon!”

“It's not even 1:00,” I said.

“Wake me up when he comes.” She laid back down on the couch, on her side with one elbow bent and her hand in the air. That can't be comfortable, I thought, but hell, for all I know she usually sleeps standing on her head. This might be a down day for her.

She woke from time to time, whenever there was a noise. The dryer buzzing. A car alarm echoing somewhere across the quad. Each time she was irate to find the cable guy had not yet arrived.

To be fair, she wasn't interested in watching television. She wanted her landline phone. The apartment building uses the cable company for telephone service. She'd been without a proper phone for four days, and she was ready to toss her little pay-as-you-go burner cell phone out the window. No matter how many times I reminded her, she couldn't seem to remember that to hear me talking on the other end, she had to hold the cell phone to her ear. I don't know, you figure it out. Maybe if they made cell phones look like brick-size cordless phones, she would get it.

Eventually the cable guy showed up and installed her phones. When I left, at her bequest, I took her car. Wheels! Zoom, zoom.... but I didn't need anything. Nowhere to go, really, nothing to buy. I drove home and parked it. The car sat on the street outside my apartment all day Thursday.

Friday morning, she called. “Can I have my car back?” she said, just a tiny bit belligerently, as if daring me to keep her key.

“Of course you can have your car back,” I said. I drove the car over and parked it outside the driveway at her building. She was outside on a park bench having a cigarette. I watched her walking toward me, a diminutive stick of a woman bearing no resemblance to the mother I used to know.

She took the car key happily, and didn't offer me a ride home. I didn't ask for one. I walked home under partly sunny skies.

The chronic malcontent flirts with terminal uniqueness

I'm sitting in the Love Shack, hunkered down under the ceiling fan with my feet in a bucket of cold water. The temperature outside is 96 °F. cooling down from something higher than that. It's about 90 in here, still not time to open the doors and windows. Hence, the bucket of water. Aaaah.

It's Friday. Now that I am living a carless summer, this is the day I typically take a 40-minute walk to meet a small but dedicated group of people to talk over some stuff. It's really too hot to hike the city sidewalks, but I am willing to go to any lengths. And the bus doesn't go there. So I walk.

Walking is good, because I am in a contemplative mood. What am I contemplating? Thanks for asking. My friend Bravadita is facing the challenge of her life—cancer. I don't understand it. I can't figure out how to think about it. I want to figure out how to deal with it. Stupid reaction, especially because it isn't me on the firing line. It's so typical of my brain to try to make everything about me.

What does one say to a friend who got blindsided with a diagnosis of cancer? To answer that question, I turned to the higher power: Google, of course. Type in what to say to friend with cancer... bam! About a billion webpages on the topic. See, never fear, the Internet is here. Here is what to say to a friend who has cancer:

I'm here for you. 
What can I do to help you today? 

Boring.

There's a much longer list of what not to say. Here are a few:

You just need some omega-3s and a few hours in a sweat lodge. 
How long do you have? 
Can I have your Gucci pumps when you are gone? 

Yeah, I can see how those responses might be a bit gauche.

Time out. My feet are numb. This plastic bucket (formerly a kitty litter container) isn't quite big enough for my size sevens. Ouch. Toe cramp. Sorry, I shouldn't be complaining about a tiny thing like a toe cramp.

That's one of the problems with my life. I want to pretend I'm the sickest, saddest, most decrepit human on the planet, but there's always some sad sack whose life is sadder than mine. What's up with that? I can't complain about losing my memory because my 86-year-old scrawny twig of a mother really is losing her memory: so not fun. I can't complain about a toe cramp, because Bravadita has frigging cancer. I can't complain about anything really, because I'm not dead. I'm alive, much as I try to pretend otherwise. And, as far as I know, I will probably be alive tomorrow. Argh!

Don't misunderstand me: I don't want to be dead. I just want to be special. Special would lend some meaning to my humdrum boring life. But only a certain kind of special, mind you. I don't want the reverse lottery kind of special: you know: cancer, amputation, brain amoebas, bus bandits. I don't want to be special enough to get hit by a car while I'm crossing Burnside, or to die in a plane crash that is never found, or to be pancaked into my basement by a 9.0 earthquake (all things I worry about, no matter how unlikely). No, if that is what comes from being special, I'm okay with ordinary. Let me hide out in the masses, a drop in the ocean of life, a worker among workers. Uniqueness can be terminal.

The chronic malcontent suffers from a vestibular disturbance

I had to get out of the Love Shack for a while today. Three reasons: The morning clouds dissipated around noon, good time to go out for a sunshine fix. Second, my own personal ocean in my inner ears (vertigo) was relatively calm. I knew it wouldn't last long, no matter how still and level I tried to keep my head. And third, the boots pounding on the roof were too much to bear. Yep, that's right. Today the Love Shack is getting a new roof.

I don't own the Love Shack, in case you were wondering if I had anything to do with it. I've never seen the roof. It's flat, that's all I know. I can only imagine on a wet day it's a sloggy mess of mushy holly berries, never-decaying holly leaves, maple tree whirly seeds, raccoon nests, and bird poop. On a dry day, it's a dusty toxic mix of all that stuff. I feel sad for the three Spanish-speaking men who have been marching around on the roof ripping stuff apart since 8:45 this morning.

My cat is not amused. He spent the morning hunkered under the couch with a concerned look on his face, probably wondering who won't stop pounding at the door. I've been trying to write. Between the pounding, hammering, scraping, and tearing, and the intermittent growl of the compressor parked at the bottom of my back steps, I was somewhat distracted. My head was starting to vibrate, not a good sign. So I abandoned my cat and my writing project to go for a trot in Mt Tabor Park.

On Wednesdays no cars are allowed. The roads are safe for bicyclists, joggers, and dog walkers. The air today was lush with spring. Spring is a special time in Portland. The leaves are a billion shades of green (and purple in some cases, what are those weird trees, anyway?). The smell of newly whacked grass wafted along the trails, cut by... let's call them workers from the county sheriffs office, brought by van to do community service in the park. I can think of worse ways to do penance for one's misdeeds.

Oddly enough, while I was jogging, my head felt fine. It was only after I stopped moving that the waves of vertigo swept through my head. The lesson is, don't stop moving, I guess. But sooner or later, I get tired (sooner, usually), and I must stop. As I'm typing this, the vestibular ocean in my inner ears rises up and falls back, shaking me like a toyboat. I'm ignoring it.

As I walked up the street toward the park, I realized the roofer has roofed three houses in this one block in two days. I guess the mantra this week is make roofs while the sun shines. These guys are efficient: plan, approach, and execution in a matter of hours. I met the roofer (a non-Hispanic White guy) when he knocked on my door asking for access to the basement so he could plug in his infernal compressor. Beyond that one interaction, I haven't seen him. I imagine he's supervising a dozen other roofs in the neighborhood.

These guys aren't super big, but they wield aluminum ladders like swords and then climb up them like ninja warriors. I doubt if these roofers suffer from vertigo. Dehydration, maybe, but not vertigo. My new theory about inner ears is that my ear crystals are clumped somewhere in the vicinity of the ear equivalent of my toes into boulders that sluggishly crash into all the nerve endings in their path. In other words, ear sludge is creating a slow-motion train wreck in my head. That is why the Epley Maneuver is only partially successful. I fear I'm too impatient, advancing through the moves before gravity can budge the sludge. Either that or I'm doing it wrong. Or I have a brain tumor. Whatever.

A ladder has now appeared outside my front window, followed by heavy pounding. Three guys sure can make a lot of noise. I just plugged my mp3 headphones in my ears: Psychedelic Furs. I sail away on my cerebral sea while my cat stoically endures.

The chronic malcontent leans in... and out

As I shake the cat hair and fingernail clippings out of my keyboard, I reflect on the possibility that sometimes vertigo is just vertigo. It doesn't have to be metaphor for anything else in my life. Right? Like, oh, I don't know...balance, maybe?

Yesterday in a fit of frustration, I put on my jogging duds and staggered up the main staircase to the top of Mt. Tabor. From the summit, I trotted down and around the road, marveling at how level-headed I felt but on the lookout in case the ground suddenly turned into an asphalt trampoline. The sun was warm. The park was crowded with Sunday pedestrians, bicyclists, skateboarders, and dogs. I felt happy to be outside, trudging my trails at half-speed while joggers blazed by me on both sides. Balance, I thought smugly. Take that.

A half hour after I got home, wham, the floor suddenly became jello and I was back on the open seas in a tiny boat. Ho hum, said I. I am quite familiar with the nuances of fluid in my head now. I picture my brain awash in a viscous murky muddy sea, but I know that isn't what is really happening. Dinky little ear rocks are meandering around, sightseeing where they shouldn't be, shredding my balance and creating the loudest, most cringe-inducing silent roar I've ever not heard.

I'm becoming a quasi-expert on performing the Epley on myself. Not expert yet, because if I were an expert, I would have effected my own cure, right? No, I'm still practicing. I love YouTube—every ENT in the world has posted a demonstration of how to do the Epley. It's great. They all do it differently, too, which is somewhat perplexing for the novice, but hey, I'm all for creativity, as long as it doesn't break my neck. So far my neck is still intact, although it is somewhat stiff from trying to hold my head level all the time. (No, I don't think it is meningitis, but thanks for asking).

What is the Epley, you ask? It's a maneuver you can perform to make use of gravity to get the ear rocks to float back along the tube into the hole. Yeah, I know those aren't the technical terms, but hey, I'm not an ENT. You can look up the anatomical terms if you really care. Rocks, tube, hole, that's all you really need to know. It's a bit like miniature putt-putt golf, but inside your inner ear, where it's dark so you have to maneuver by feel. Like, how close to barfing am I right now, scale of 1 to 10?

Actually, I haven't barfed yet, I am proud to say. I know pride goeth, etc. etc., but I'm hopeful that as long as I have to put up with this vertigo crap, that it will remain the subjective type rather than morph into the objective type. Subjective vertigo is where I feel like I'm moving. Objective vertigo is where the world seems like it is spinning around me. Like how you feel when the Roundup starts twirling and you realize you've made a terrible mistake by eating your corndog before the ride rather than after.

The Epley is like a slow motion head waggle followed by a half-pirouette, performed horizontally. You can't picture it? Well, like I said, there are multiple methods to execute an Epley, but the one I am finding easiest goes like this: (while lying on your back with your head hanging over a pillow), BAD side head back and hold 60 seconds, then GOOD side head back and hold 60 seconds, then roll on the good shoulder, look down, and SPIT. Hold until the boat stops rocking or you are thoroughly disgusted.

Well, actually the spitting part is optional, I just added that because usually I've found that I'm not miraculously cured when I roll over and that makes me so angry I feel like I could spit. But at that point, my nose is all but buried in my lime green shag rug and I'm thinking as I'm counting the seconds in my head: ants, cat barf, dust mites. I feel obligated to refrain from adding my spit to the mix, mostly because who knows what will rush in if I open my mouth. Besides, according to my older brother, when I was about five, I proclaimed in my sleep, if you turn over and spit, you'll die, and even though that was 50-some years ago, I'm not willing to press my luck.

The thing about the Epley is this: It's not an instantaneous cure. It takes time for the ear rocks to settle in properly, and some of them still seem inclined to go gallivanting. So if you are going to try this at home, you may have to do it more than once. I also read that you should sleep sitting up for two nights afterward, but I haven't been able to accomplish that feat. Maybe that is why I'm still whining about vertigo. Well, hell. If it wasn't this, it would be something else. Like, ants on my desk? WTF!?