Went to the Emergency Room (Patreon)

Some folks might’ve seen my tweets about this on Bluesky but I wanted to post a public journal too so all the info is in one place.

On Monday afternoon while I was doing cardio at the gym, I was hit with a sudden wave of extreme dizziness. I was barely able to walk in a straight line, and since I had ridden my motorcycle to the gym I knew I wouldn’t be able to ride it home. When the dizziness didn’t pass in 15 minutes or so I was able to call my parents and have them pick me up and I stayed with them for the next several hours.

Over that time I continued to get worse until I was barely able to stand and had extreme nausea to where I couldn’t even take a sip of water without immediately retching. (I also lost my lunch, three times). Because the symptoms were so extreme and weren't making sense, I decided to go to the ER.

At this point I was absolutely terrified. I genuinely thought I might die. I couldn't walk, I couldn't see straight, I just felt some of the most awful I've ever felt in my life. Even when I had Covid, it was bad, but it was like the flu. You know you'll get better eventually. With this I just had no idea what was happening with my body at all.

It didn’t seem to be a case of heat exhaustion because I didn’t have any other symptoms associated with that: no excessive feeling of hot or cold, no fever, no trouble breathing, no heart palpitations. I also had no other symptoms of an inner ear infection, no stuffiness, sore throat or pain in my sinuses.

At the hospital they ran a full battery of tests including a CT scan, MRI, EKG, heart ultrasound and several rounds of blood work. No tests showed any signs of a stroke, tumor, or other heart problems. All my levels from the blood tests were fine. In fact they said other than the dizziness I’m very healthy. So that’s one silver lining to this whole thing.

Unfortunately they weren’t able to give me a real explanation of what’s wrong. The physical therapists determined there's a problem with my vestibular ocular reflex. That is the reflex that allows your eyes to stay focused on an object while your head moves around. My eyes aren’t doing that, which is contributing to the dizziness. However, whether that is causing the dizziness, or a symptom of some other problem like a disruption of the crystals in my inner ear, they couldn’t say. (I don't think it's the cause since I'm still dizzy when I have my eyes closed or try to move around that way.) I stayed overnight for observation. Then I was discharged yesterday around 5pm with the instructions to basically take a few days off and rest.

I did have significant improvement overnight in the hospital. I’m less dizzy now than when I was admitted. I can walk and do things around the house okay, but right now wouldn’t be able to drive. I can sit and work at the computer or draw for a little bit but I get tired pretty quickly from trying to focus my eyes and keep the room from spinning. Unfortunately I haven’t really seen any improvement from last night into this morning. So I’m just hoping it will continue to get better.

I’m going to take a few days off from doing any serious work since that’s about all I can do right now. Hopefully it won’t last for too long.