The Beginning - Part 2

March 6, 2006

It was a Monday and my alarm went off at 6:00am as usual. I reluctantly flung off the blankets, swung my legs over the side of the bed and sat up. Immediately the room began to spin. The entire world around me was moving and moving fast. I thought perhaps I sat up too quickly and tried to sit still and just breath, thinking this would pass. And then the nausea hit. I needed to get across the hall to the bathroom pronto, but as soon as I stood up I hit the floor. My equilibrium was gone and I had no sense of orientation. I couldn't tell up from down, left from right. And the world around me kept spinning and spinning. The walls, the furniture, the floor...everything was in motion; it was like being in a fun house. This was beyond dizziness, this was full-on vertigo. I had no control and I was terrified.

I somehow managed to crawl my way to the bathroom (hitting my head on a few door jams along the way) and made it just in time for the vomiting to begin. My head felt extremely heavy, as if it was being pulled to the ground by some invisible magnet; I couldn't keep it upright and had to let it rest on my arm. I sat on the floor, clutching the toilet to keep myself from tipping over and called for my husband between retches.

Nick came running. When I was finally able to gasp my breath I explained to him what was going on and asked for some crackers and soda. Just something, anything that might calm my stomach. But the vertigo was not letting up and the vomiting continued for another hour. The crackers and soda became something to force down just so I had something besides stomach acid to throw up. I finally asked Nick to call work and let them know I was not coming in today. I had never been sick like this before and it was concerning enough to Nick that he took the day off work as well.

And it's a good thing he did. The vertigo and the vomiting continued for nearly 8 straight hours that day. I puked my guts out almost non-stop all day while the world around me remained in perpetual motion. I was cold, shaking and so weak. And I was scared. What the hell was happening to me?

Nick spent the day on the phone with our doctors office attempting to get a prescription for something that could stop this. At long last a prescription was called in for Promethagan, which is a suppository form of Phenegran (a very common anti-nausea drug). Now were someone to suggest a suppository to me at any other point in my life...ever...I would have told them to shove it up their...well, you know. But I couldn't keep half a cracker down for more than 10 minutes, let alone a pill. This was the only way in, so to speak. And at that point, I would have done just about anything to end this hell. Dignity be damned, I welcomed the ass pill.

Thankfully, it worked. It stopped the puking and, as a most welcome side effect, knocked me out. Which meant the vertigo stopped (Halle-freakin'-lujah!), though my balance and equilibrium hadn't quite returned yet. I vaguely remember Nick half-carrying me to bed and changing my clothes. I was so exhausted and so completely out of my skull that Elvis, The Pope and Tori Spelling could have shown up in my bedroom, in a canoe and wearing coordinating lingerie, and I probably wouldn't have noticed.

What I do remember was the deep concern on Nick's face, and my repeated assurances to him that I was okay. I wasn't completely convinced of that myself; the reassurance was as much for me as it was for him. But I was feeling grateful. Grateful for my husband who was there for me through this dreadful day, and for the magical medicine that brought it all to an end. I prayed that it was, in fact, at an end and that I would wake up tomorrow feeling right as rain.

The Beginning - Part 1

It all started innocently enough. A tingle here, a twinge there. A funny feeling in my feet sometimes when I bent my neck. The occasional dizzy spell. "That's odd," I would think. But I never gave these little anomalies a second thought. Why should I? They were nothing. It was my poor posture, my lack of sleep, my terribly uncomfortable but gorgeous shoes. It was just one of those things, I thought. It's fine.

Then I woke up one morning, in the Summer of 2005, with the entire right side of my face and my ear completely numb. My first thought was that I really must have slept funny and I tried to get moving so as to return the blood flow to my face. But the numbness didn't go away. All day. How weird, I thought. It was annoying, but I went about my day.

But the numbness continued on for several days, by which time I was becoming a tad concerned. I had a wisdom tooth on that side of my face that my dentist had been advising me to get removed for some time now. "Great," I thought. Now I'm paying the price for my procrastination.

However, a visit to my dentist and an x-ray revealed that the tooth was actually fine and wasn't anywhere near a facial nerve; my dentist assured me that the tooth was not causing the problem. I left his office baffled, but relieved I wasn't going to need an emergency tooth extraction. A few days later the numbness went away and I forgot all about it.

The following months went on as usual and I was feeling fine. I still had the odd tingle or dizzy spell here and there, but it was never anything that lingered and I continued to think nothing of it. That is, until the morning of March 6 the following year.