Wakeup Call: Hitting the Wall

I've been waking up early this spring. Like 4 AM early. So it was no biggie when I opened my eyes in my hotel room in Hendersonville, NC at 4:45 AM on Sunday, April 29. What was a big deal was seeing the ceiling moving.  It was disconcerting to have the room spinning crazily around me, and no fun alcohol overindulgence to explain it. I closed my eyes and somehow drifted back to sleep. Opened them again at 6 to find the room still spinning. I mean, spinning so hard I couldn't stand up. 

How inconvenient. I had been planning to drive the 8 hours home this morning. Wanted to get an early start.

I thought, lying flat with my eyes closed. I knew what had happened. I had overdone it yesterday, gotten dehydrated again. I'd hiked around in the mountains for most of the day. Capped it off with bending and stooping and lifting heavy boxes, giving a talk, then bending and stooping and lifting more heavy boxes, and I hadn't drunk nearly enough water to get me through it all. If water even could save me. This time of year I drink pediatric electrolyte by the quart. I dehydrate easily. I know this about myself.

I had been stricken, again, with BPPV (Benign  Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo). A little crystal, which naturally floats around in your inner ear fluid, had dislodged and gotten stuck in my cochlear canal, where it was affecting the normal flow of fluid in my inner ear. It's that fluid that tells your brain where you are in space. When the fluid doesn't move right, your brain responds by sending your eyes into uncontrolled motion.  Mine were darting rapidly all the way to the right over and over again.  I couldn't stop it.

This was bad. Because not only was I horribly dizzy, but I was nauseated, too. 

I crawled to the sink for an ice bucket, then crawled back to bed with the bucket on my chest. Why wouldn't it stop? 

I rested for awhile (being that dizzy is absolutely exhausting), then crawled to my laptop and Googled "Julie Zickefoose Vertigo." 

Up came my post from June 4, 2015

Not coincidentally, as explained in the link above,  I'd had this before, after a day in the hot sun bending and lifting muck buckets full of cow manure. But that vertigo, which went on for a couple of days, was nothing like this. This was incapacitating, devastating, violent beyond description. There was really no living with this. There was just surviving.

I found the link in the post to a very simple video that told me what to do--hang my head off a pillow and roll it around, then sit up quickly. This is supposed to move the crystal and dislodge it. Sitting up after the  maneuver would cause it to fall out of my cochlear canal. Easier said than done. 

I did the Epley Maneuver twice on each side, because I was so disoriented I couldn't even tell which ear was affected. 

It didn't work. 

It. Didn't. Work.

The maneuvers actually seemed to make the vertigo worse. Now I was retching regularly, as well as spinning. "Abject" is one word I'd use to describe my condition.

I sent an SOS text to Shila, who had turned me on to the Epley Maneuver in the first place. I can't tell you how comforting it is to have a friend answer your text at 6 something AM when you are nine hours from home, in a hotel room alone, on a Sunday, and the ceiling is spinning over you. And it's sinking in on you that the only way you have to get home is to drive your car. And you can't even make it to the bathroom, much less get behind the wheel. Oh man. I was really screwed.

I put my phone on speaker and Shila and I talked about what might be going on. It seemed that the Epley Maneuver had moved the crystal, all right, but now the vertigo was so bad I could neither stand up nor lie down. The only way I could get any relief was to sit bolt upright! Try doing that when you feel like collapsing.

Shila rooted around and found a vertigo clinic in Hendersonville! Makes sense, because BPPV and other types of vertigo affect older people more, and a lot of people are retiring to this part of NC. I called the number she sent, and left a message on their "hotline." I told them I was desperate and alone at the Mountain Lodge right there in their town. That I had severe vertigo and needed help, preferably NOW. I'm still waiting for that callback. It was Sunday morning,  yes, but you'd think they'd have called me back by now, just to see if I was still needing help, or was just a pile of dizzy bones in a hotel room with a Do Not Disturb sign on the door. Nope.

I'd hit a wall and was plastered flat against it.  This was about as bad as it gets. Shila kept me from freaking all the way out while she figured out what to have me do. She was working on a theory that the crystal was lodged in a posterior canal, and was about to take me through some different exercises to address that. I wasn't looking forward to that. I had barely pulled off the Epley maneuver. It took me about an hour and a half of sitting bolt upright to work up the strength to think about lying down. I know that sounds weird, but the vertigo was so bad, if I so much as leaned back against the pillows I started retching again. 

Finally I called Shila and told her I was ready for the test, which would involve lying back on a couple of pillows, letting my head hang down behind me, and turning my head to the right, and then to the left. If the vertigo came back on either turn, we'd know which ear was affected.

Terrified that the retching would start again, I started to lean back. I lay down. Shila told me to turn my head to the right. Nothing happened.

Then I turned my head left. Nothing happened. 

The vertigo was gone. The crystal must have finally dropped out of my ear canal during that hour and a half of sitting bolt upright. In the end, my body told me what I had to do: roll my head around some, then sit up, and stay sitting up. Anything else: violently contraindicated.

Here's a link to the best, simplest video on The Epley Maneuver. It has comforting music and no razzmatazz.

That was about the worst six hours of my life, but I got through it, with a lot of help from my friend. It was 11:30 AM before I could even think about getting behind the wheel. Eating? Forget it. I limped back home, taking about 10 hours for a 7.5 hour drive. I stopped every hour or two and rested, feeling weak and woozy but grateful that I was on the road at all. Finally ate breakfast at 4:30 PM at Tamarack: The Art of West Virginia, ever my favorite highway rest stop in the universe. They play homemade string music, show WV artists in a gallery, and sell glorious hand-made work from WV artists and writers. And the food is catered by The Greenbriar. So you must stop there.

When I was going through Bristol, Virginia, I saw a gigantic Confederate flag on a hilltop, stark red against a blazing blue sky. I didn't photograph that.

But soon after, in Abingdon, I saw a very large dogwood tree on the edge of a cow pasture that was as white as a thunderhead. Not a leaf on it--just snow-white flowers, piling up against the sky. It was so beautiful I wept. Granted, I was tired and shaky, but I think I would have anyway. That is something, to see something so beautiful you just break down. And a native tree at that.

I stopped to take a nap and appreciate the dogwoods at the rest stop, since I couldn't stop for that one. I thought of Xerxes, who is said to have halted his Greek army's march for several days so that he might admire the beauty of a sycamore tree they encountered along the way. I could have lain under that lovely dogwood tree, looking up at the sky through its bracts, all afternoon. But I had to get home.

 

I felt the same about this magnificent redbud, but it was a bit close to the highway for lounging while admiring. See, I'm full of excuses for not stopping. I will always be that way.

 The light coming through new spring leaves was dazzling.

 

I felt so very, very lucky to be coming home under my own power, and not lying in a Hendersonville ER full of anti-nausea medication, waiting in line for a bunch of hugely expensive and unnecessary tests, probably starting with an electroencephalogram.  I had narrowly avoided putting myself in the medical machine, the diagnostic sausage grinder that eats your time and money for all the world as if it were an industry designed to do just that. The simple, elegant Epley Maneuver had come through. I had, with Shila's help, fixed myself.

 It just took a few hours longer than I'd have liked.

 I wondered why my weekend of hard work, sharing with like-minded souls, and taking joy in nature had ended so badly. Shrugged and decided that it just did, that's all, and there was no preventing it and no feeling sorry for myself. There was only taking the message. And that message is to stop doing so much. I've gotten that hint a number of times, but there's nothing like being grabbed, shaken hard, whirled in circles and turned upside down to get one's attention. It was a cosmic smackdown.

It was time to pay attention.

 

To the afternoon light running down the flanks of the Appalachian foothills. 

To the familiar shapes of the Three Graces, waiting to leaf out still, at the end of April. 

 

To the Hereford, looking over at her new calf.

To the freshly-washed white of its face, and the slow drain of a long day into peach.

To the full moon rising, getting caught in the arms of an heirloom pear tree, home at last.

Vertigo!

June peonies, March sheds.

Sitting down long enough to do a post is a real struggle in June. But I have a PSA to write, a great need to take the time to write about something that happened to me, because I hope it will help someone, anyone out there who's suffering from vertigo--unexplained dizziness, with no other symptoms. Here's what happened.  I basically killed myself all Memorial Day weekend getting planting, weeding, mulching and manuring done. I got this jones to manure the gardens, and I wasn't going to let lack of a backhoe or pickup truck stop me. My friend Jeff told me I was welcome to dig around in the barnyard where their cows come to give birth, 100 years of continuous cow poop in dry stratae free for the taking. Wahoo! Full of weed seeds, too, but that rich stuff is what my gardens need.

I have golden raspberries from my dear friend Connie Toops in NC that were crying for manure. 

photo by Connie Toops

I've got rhubarb from my dear friend Ann Hoffert in ND that wanted some too. 

photo by Connie Toops

 I'd put the little steel mesh carrier on the back of the Subaru, take shovels and dig the stuff into containers, tubs and muck buckets and window boxes, and haul it home by the 300 lb load. I probably hauled a ton of manure in muck buckets and tubs on the back of my Subaru. Sunday and Monday I made repeated manure runs to fortify all the gardens. Yes, it would have been nice to have a truck but I don't, so I do what I can. Bill and the kids helped, but I waaay overdid it. I got dehydrated and though I was drinking gallons of water, nothing was coming back out.  I had no pee. Weird, I thought. Then while hauling a tub of manure for the last load up a steep hill in hot sun I suddenly got dizzy and had to quit. I had lifted the tup up, rising rapidly from a squat, and boom! I just had to sit down and let the kids haul the rest for me. I felt like puking, and I was actually staggering like a sailor. That was Monday. From then until Wednesday afternoon I had vertigo. I never want to have vertigo again. I was mildly nauseated and listless, with no other symptoms. I wondered if I'd had a little stroke. Not a pleasant thought. But had no weakness or paralysis or cognition issues. Well, my head felt very fuzzy, but I was making sense, and I knew who the president is (Roosevelt, right?) and the date and day of the week and all that. My brain was functioning reasonably normally, considering I felt like I was on a pitching ship.

I'd put it on the snap peas, too.

Finally on Weds. around 3 pm I couldn't stand it any more. I'd done some online digging and come up the possibility of an inner ear infection, but it came on so suddenly that didn't really fit. I didn't think it was a disease. It seemed to me like an event, not a disease. I called Shila, my personal shaman and wellness guru (who happens to know a ridiculous amount about the workings of the human body as a certified cranio-sacral and polarity therapist). After running through some questions to ascertain if I'd had a TIE (transient ischemic event, or mini stroke),  she told me she thought I had BPPV*, and told me to go on Youtube and look for The Epley Maneuver, which is this exercise where you incline your head back while lying with your upper back on a pillow. Then you roll your head around slowly in a spiral. Doing this will dislodge  any otoliths, little crystals that form in your inner ear, that might be blocking the flow of fluid in the cochlea. Having free flow of fluid in the cochlea, the little snail-like coil in the inner ear, is vital to knowing where you are in space. Stop that flow and you are seasick, Sally, and it ain't fun.

I did the Epley maneuver as shown on YouTube once for each ear and got up, not dizzy any more. It was a flippin' miracle. A doctor I spoke to afterward, who confessed he'd never heard of the maneuver, said, "Based on your symptoms, I'd have sent you straight to the ER for an angiogram."  Well, this was free, not scary or hard to do at all, did not involve massive ER charges,  and I am feeling so very, very lucky to have a best friend and incredible healer in Shila. 

*The name for the condition is "Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo." It's caused by rapid changes in head position that dislodge otoliths that then bung up your cochlear canal and keep the fluid in the cochlear canal from moving correctly. Being completely dehydrated probably had something to do with my sudden onset BPPV, too.

As many of my stories do, it gets better. We have a Rain Crows new music rehearsal on the evening of June 3, and Wendy, who is vital to contributing, receiving, arranging and reacting to our newly written songs, is clearly not operating at full capacity. She says she's dizzy and nauseated. No other symptoms. Has been for a couple of days, and she's miserable. I scribble "The Epley Maneuver" down on a scrap of paper and give it to her. Just to make sure, I texted her this link:

The Epley Maneuver

 She manages to make it back to where she's staying, looks up the video, and by 10:30 that night she's done the maneuver and the vertigo is gone. Hallelujah. Let life resume. 

So already, I've had one friend present with the same symptoms I had, and Shila's wisdom has rippled out and helped another person. I give this story to you as a gift for when your cochlea gets jammed. Or the cochlea of anyone you love. Vertigo with no other symptoms. Remember this. Look it up, do it. If BPPV is your issue, The Epley Maneuver will fix you.

xoxo

jz

Obligatory Disclaimer: Although my family calls me Dr. Zick, I am not a doctor. There are many things that can cause vertigo, including inner and middle ear infections (which are often viral) and mini- strokes. I'm offering this easy-to-do maneuver as a first, at-home stop in figuring out what might be going on when you're suddenly taken dizzy with no other symptoms. If you execute it as directed a couple of times and it doesn't work, hie thee to your doctor.