I'm sitting here wearing wool socks and running shoes. Why, you ask? Have I gone mad? Am I cured? Unfortunately, no and no. My shoe issues are still huge. Today I endured outright mocking at the farmers' market. It was maybe a brisk 39 degrees and rainy and there I was with my toes hanging out in lovely summery sandals. "aren't your feet cold??" people asked me, not unkindly but baffled and concerned. If there was time I gave a brief overview. But most people didn't ask, just assumed I was a slave to fashion idiot who has no clue about how to dress for the weather. This offends me deeply on many levels. One lady cackled about it basically to my face. "–And she's wearing sandals!!" ha ha ha, what a scream. Oh, yeah. I gave her the fish eye all right.
But that was this morning. I was gearing up for Isaac's 7th birthday party at the Taekwondoh studio, gathering supplies. I didn't want to be incapacitated by dizziness BEFORE the party. I knew the party itself (a large room with the entire floor made of foam– lovely) would be a trial in vestibular terms. But now, to be frank, I'm actually trying to provoke a full-on, no holds barred vertigo attack. My goal is not just the ill dizzy feeling I now feel already, but actual 360-degree rotation of the room which more likely than not will lead to violent vomiting.
This is my homework.
All of you who have crammed for the bar exam, or stayed up 72 straight hours to finish that big paper, or slaved over the last 400 pages of your PhD dissertation, you don't know anything about homework suffering. THIS is REAL HOMEWORK.
The point? Is my vestibular therapist just a sadist? Well, no. He's actually a very kind man who is trying his utmost to understand what ails me and how to help me. Last week I had a sort of baffling attack in the middle of the night, which has never happened before. I woke up horrendously nauseated and nearly barfed. I took antivert and eventually it made it stop, and I went back to bed. As I was drifting off, I thought I saw the windows move. Stomach flu? Well, no other symptoms and no one else had it; food poisoning? Well, I ate only things that everyone else ate and everyone else was fine. A migraine? Well, I've never had a migraine, had no headache, and antivert doesn't cure migraines. So… was it that I went to the farmers' market (last Saturday) and then to the Natural History Museum, where DEAR GOD they project things on to the floor!!? Looking at all the options it seemed most likely that it was an attack of vertigo provoked by an overload of the vestibular system during the day. But we don't know that for sure… it could have been a fluke. I'm going to see the Cleveland CLinic specialist, Dr. White on Nov 9, and Vince wants us to have gathered the information she will need by then.
So, hence the test.
Apparently some forms of vertigo are impossible to induce, like Meniere's. (Well, you can induce it by going out and eating Mexican or Japanese… Meniere's is all about salt.) The test for me is whether my vertigo can be induced by external forces, such as shoes for instance. This week shoes, next week, eyes. We're being scientific about it. And Vince bets that I can't pull it off. He just thinks I will feel horrible– but that doesn't count. He wants spinning, and when I'm spinning he wants Ben to look at my eyes and see which way they "beat."
So it's for science. And the way I look at it, it's win-win. Either we learn that YES INDEED I can provoke a horrible vertigo attack on par with the 6/11 attack that started it all, or we learn that the shoe thing is really not a big deal after all. Maybe it's like there's a bad first hour and then it gets better? Since my goal normally is to avoid vertigo, I always take the shoes off as soon as I start to feel horrible, so I really don't know how it's going to play out.
Ask me tomorrow.