That time I used Google to cure myself of something

In most cases, people will tell you (as they have definitely told me) not to Google symptoms or use “Doctor Google” to try to diagnose or treat something, the implication being that whatever you are likely to find will be misleading and/or completely wrong, and possibly even wrong in a dangerous way. All of which is often true! But not always, as I found out a number of years ago, when I was hit with a medical issue very suddenly, and the internet was my only hope in terms of figuring out what I should do about it.

So what was the issue? In a word, vertigo. Repeated and paralyzing vertigo, which started when I woke up one morning and turned my head to look at the clock. Immediately, my head started spinning as though I had just gotten off the Tilt-A-Whirl ride at the fair. After about 30 seconds it went away, but when I sat up, the same thing happened — swirling, head spinning, a feeling of being nauseated. I should mention here that I suffer from motion sickness quite badly, and always have — according to my family, I used to throw up on pretty much every car ride.

Even as an adult, I found I couldn’t go on any amusement park ride that went around in circles — even ones designed for small children. Going up and down was fine, but around and around was death. When our youngest daughter was little she begged me to go on the spinning tea-cup ride, where you sit in a giant tea cup and then the cup goes around and the thing it’s attached to also goes around. After what seemed like hours of agony (it was probably about three minutes) I had to go lie down on a bench, and didn’t feel right for hours.

I’ve since read a bit about why that kind of vertigo and nausea occurs, and it apparently has something to do with a confusion between what your eyes are telling your brain (that the world is spinning around or passing by at high speed) and what your inner ear is telling your brain, which is that you are sitting still and not moving at all. The contrast between these two things is difficult for your brain to make sense of, and in some people that makes them nauseated.

Anyway, to make a long story short, vertigo of any kind is my least favourite experience. I would rather get hit by a bus. I had a friend who got something called Meniere’s disease, which caused episodes of paralyzing vertigo that would sometimes last for hours, and I think if that happened to me I would jump off a tall building or walk in front of a train. What made the episodes I was having that day more manageable was that they only lasted for maybe 30 seconds each time. But it happened any time I moved my head, even slightly.

Normally I would ask my wife Becky about a medical issue of this kind, since she comes from a family of nurses, but she was away on a trip with some friends and none of our children were home either. What was I to do? I thought about going to a walk-in clinic, but it was a weekend and anyway I wasn’t sure I should be driving, since any time I turned my head I got a wave of vertigo. So I did what I always do in virtually any situation where I don’t know something — I Googled “vertigo when I turn my head,” and instantly came across a bunch of pages that mentioned something called Benign Positional Paroxysmal Vertigo or BPPV.

As I dug further, I found a number of articles that said this condition is caused by crystals in your inner ear that somehow get out of alignment. At first, I thought that I had stumbled into some kind of faith-healing, naturopathic weirdness. Crystals in your ear? Sure thing, pal. But as it turns out, there are tiny crystals in your inner ear, which was news to me (I confess I didn’t pay close attention in biology, but I don’t remember anyone mentioning crystals in your ear). For some reason that no one seems to understand, those crystals can occasionally get dislodged and wind up somewhere else in your ear, somewhere they aren’t supposed to be, and then the signals they send to the brain about the position of your head get scrambled. Bingo: vertigo.

A bit more Googling and I found a solution — and a fairly simple one. It’s called the Epley maneuver, and it involves lying down with your head at an angle and then moving it right and left, to move the crystals back into position. Physiotherapists can do it, but you can also do it yourself — so I decided I had nothing to lose by giving it a try. I watched a YouTube video and looked at some diagrams, and went through the motions, and that night I slept sitting up, as one site suggested. Bingo! No more vertigo. It was like a miracle. I’ve never been so happy about something I found on the internet.

I’ve since had several recurrances of BPPV — in one case after flying on a transatlantic flight, and another time after getting an ear infection — and each time I have done the Epley maneuver, and each time it has fixed it like magic. Every time someone mentions having sudden periods of intermittent vertigo, I tell them about the Epley maneuver, because it was literally like flicking a switch and making the vertigo vanish. So don’t let anyone tell you that you shouldn’t look up the symptoms of something on the internet!

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