Re-inventing Karla

The Other Side of Vertigo

We had dinner with our friends, John and Candace and our sweet God daughter, Audrey Claire last night. After catching up and laughing in their spacious back yard, reading and dancing with Audrey and eating fresh, beautifully cooked food, I found myself talking about the vertigo. I shared pretty openly, at a core-level, getting more and rawer as I talked. It felt good but also a little exposing. I hadn’t shared at that level while actually experiencing the vertigo and the dizziness. I couldn’t. It was enough to just survive it.

Just that morning I had watched a couple of people on YouTube share about their experiences with labyrinthitis and vertigo. Marcela, my physical therapist, had mailed me an article with a link to a multi-part blog series about a woman’s experience very close to mine.

I watched a 20-something heavily inked Irish guy talk about being dizzy all the time, a 50ish British woman who still had it after 26 months, (my heart wrenching while watching her doing her head and eye exercises); there was a sensitive type man in his early 30s sharing about anxiety, a bald stockbroker guy sharing dryly about the facts, and a lovely religious musician who had written the blog; all suffering from this mysterious virus that had suddenly attached itself to a nerve in all of our inner ears, savagely changing our lives for a while.

I’m not sure why I never looked for these testimonies during this whole last year while suffering from the condition. I noticed that most of them were writing and sharing from the other side of it, too. Thank you, John for those perfect words, the other side . . . It was so healing. Maybe it was the last piece I needed to get myself firmly on that other side.

We all had so much in common. It is an invisible condition. You don’t look sick. No one knows there is anything wrong with you. It is intensely isolating. You can be perfectly healthy, spiritually aware, emotionally intelligent, and it can still hit you. I found out these things:

I didn’t cause it.

This isn’t the beginning of “getting old.”

It’s not all in my head.

It won’t last forever.

I didn’t go”crazy”.

It sure seems like a lot of people have suffered from it. It’s getting more and more common. I’m not saying all this to scare you dear friends and readers. I’m saying it because it has flooded me with relief. I didn’t cause it. I didn’t cause it. I didn’t cause it. I didn’t have some sort of anxiety breakdown. I’m not less healthy or my brain isn’t less smart because it took it longer to compensate than other people’s brains. It is sudden and violent and it has no cause and no discrimination. And although I am grateful for excellent health care, the medical field still understands very little about it. That’s why they can’t give you any definitive answers. Like, when is it going to go away?!?

I am grateful to my sweetheart who lived through it with me. I am grateful for all of you and the friends who are still willing to listen to the memories of what it was like and how the anxiety changes you. That’s another thing I learned; the accompanying anxiety is a biological reaction to vertigo. Again, I didn’t cook this up, I didn’t go crazy. I was just so terrified it was going to happen again that any whirling sensation, dizzy feeling, pressure in my head, or slight stumble could catapult me into physical and emotional fear. And I am so relieved that this is a normal response.

It’s not that I want to dwell on all of this and swim around in the muck of it. But I’m gaining a perspective from the other side that I didn’t have while in the midst of it. And I am grateful for that perspective. I am grateful for the wisdom. And I hope that I have the opportunity to give it back to anyone suffering from biological or mental/emotional anxiety. No matter the source, anxiety is anxiety and it feels horrible.

My compassion has increased a hundredfold. And I am grateful for that, too. It has helped make me even more whole. And that is a worthy way to live one’s life. Growing and expanding into greater wisdom and wholeness.

P.S. And I am overwhelmingly grateful for the wholeness and health to go to Paris and Yosemite and Point Reyes and restaurants and parties and church and work and the ability to drive to it all!