Spinning around

Vertigo might be a famous Hitchcock film, but it is also a particularly awful condition which has made me so sick this weekend I had to have an injection in the thigh so that I could walk a few metres without feeling like throwing up.

I’ve had occasional bouts of vertigo since my ears were radiated in 2007, and generally its been nothing worse than a slight loss of balance when standing up.  Last Thursday and Friday I noticed that when I stopped driving and started to get out of the car, I felt as though the car was rolling forwards, but it wasn’t.  Last night I started stumbling into walls, as though I was walking on a boat in a rolling sea.  

By this morning I felt permanently sick, and couldn’t really think straight or stand up for long.  Andrew took me to the doctor, where I struggled to remember the type of cancer I’d had, or even who my ENT is.  I’d love to say the doctor was kind and helpful, but in the great lottery of the health service I found someone who was more interested in how the reconstruction of my soft palate had been performed than in the fact that I felt really ill.

Eventually, with nothing more than a terse instruction to go and see my ENT as soon as possible, he left me to wait for a nurse to give me an injection to stop the nausea.  Luckily the injection started working in about half an hour, and a couple of hours later I actually felt almost normal.  I sat by the pool while the girls slowly turned blue (“no mummy, the water is getting WARMER!”), and eventually felt good enough to have dinner.

Blah.  Horrible weekend really.  Thank goodness Christmas is only five days away.

Update: Saw my ENT today and he diagnoised Benign Paroxysmal Postural Vertigo – non scary spinning when I move around.  He explained it very well, but here is an explanation I found online:

Inside the inner ear is a series of canals filled with fluid. These canals are at different angles. When the head is moved, the rolling of the fluid inside these canals tells the brain exactly how far, how fast and in what direction the head is moving. BPPV is thought to be caused by little calcium carbonate crystals (otoconia) within the canals. Usually, these crystals are held in special reservoirs within other structures of the inner ear (saccule and utricle). It is thought that injury or degeneration of the utricle may allow the ‘ear rocks’ to escape into the balance organ and interfere with the fluid flow.

So, after various head tilting maneuvers, it seems he might have got the crystals back in the right place.  I feel fine now anyway.  He had a good check around my mouth and above the palate, so that was reassuring too.