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.
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