I have never been graceful. Fast, yes. I’m a good runner, a quick walker, I like to get places in a hurry.

But graceful? No. In years of nursing, I carried home some hellacious bruises because on my way to codes I would bounce myself off all manner of pointy objects, and not slow down for damage checks or damage prevention.

Years later, when I feel good, I walk fast. And for the first time in months, I was starting to feel good again. So my internal speed regulator bumped me back up to my normal cruise speed—which is about twice as fast as most people seem to walk.

And, because of that whole damn graceful thing, I sped right into an obstacle on the floor in my still-not-unpacked office, whanged myself across the room, careened into the wall, bruised my right wrist and my left thigh from smacking into other objects on the way, and jarred myself so hard my teeth clacked.

But, aside from the bruises, I figured “no harm, no foul,” and went back to my regularly scheduled life, as I have always done.

Two days later, I had a sudden cluster of icepick migraines, which had died down to almost nonexistent in recent weeks. When I went to stand up, the room spun in circles.

And now I’m back to square one, back to being constantly and queasily dizzy, back to migraines, back to being unable to look either left or right without feeling the world lurch.

This time I know how to fix the problem, and this time I know what caused it, so A) I’m not afraid it’s something that will kill me, and B) I should be able to shorten my recovery time.

But I HATE feeling like this. I HATE having to slow down. I already have too much I want to do and not enough time to do it in.

This. Does. Not. Help.

Back from the doc. No, don’t know what’s wrong with me yet, and he was not thrilled to see how bad the vertigo was. The specialist visits remain on the schedule.

BUT….

I got a prescription for Antivert (meclizine) which is also available over the counter as chewable Dramamine or Bonine, and which I’ll probably end up just getting that way if this stays a problem. And the medication works. It only treats symptoms, but that it does beautifully.

I feel better than I have in a couple of months. I can work sitting up at my desk, I can walk without having to lean on Matt or a wall, the room is staying in one place instead of rocking like it was careering through heavy seas, I have no nausea, and even the headache is mostly better—though after doing a real-time happy dance just because I could, it went from gone to present again. So I’ll limit future happy dances to mental ones.

If the meclizine continues to work for me, I should be able to get myself back on a regular work schedule.

Right now, after having done a ton of e-mails, I’m getting ready to go through the 150+ pending Editor Applications. I felt too bad last night to even look at them, though I did check to see how many were in there. (Fewer than there are now.)

I’m hoping last night was the last time I’ll lose any work because of whatever this is.

Oh. The anemia is a non-issue. It was a temporary dip, and I’m back to normal there.

I’m bleary-eyed and exhausted from several weeks of worry and lack of sleep, but I’m back.

The news is excellent. My brother-in-law came through the second surgery beautifully. He’s at home today, and while he’ll be on disability for a couple of months while he recuperates, he is himself, and all the horrible things that could have happened didn’t.

I’m still going to be around sparsely for the rest of the month. We had a huge amount of hard physical work staring us in the face before all this started, and we put it aside for the last couple weeks (for obvious reasons)…but our completion deadline is the end of this month. All the work’s still there, and now we have half the time to do it.

So I’m going to spend today mostly sleeping. And I’m going to work like a dog the rest of the month.

After that, I hope to be back here regularly again. I’ve missed being here.

My brother-in-law’s surgery has been pushed back two weeks to allow his surgeon to do it after his vacation, which starts Friday, and to allow the department chief to scrub in on the surgery.

This will also allow my brother-in-law to get his Dilantin levels up, to decrease the odds of further seizures, to get his blood pressure down, and to otherwise improve the baseline health that would affect his surgical outcome.

Tomorrow would have been better, I think, but not with his surgeon halfway around the globe for a week or so immediately afterward.

Here’s the news. My brother-in-law is now back home because the hospital where he was cannot do anything else for him.

The tumors in his brain are benign. That’s the good news. The diagnosis is intracranial cavernous hemagiomas.

The bad news is, he needs to see a neurologist. He needs to have at least the largest of the hemangiomas removed from his brain—it’s 9cm in diameter, about the size of a baseball.

Because it has been slow-growing, his brain has rerouted around this mammoth tumor, so that until about a week ago, it wasn’t apparent that anything was going wrong. Last week something—we have no idea what—changed, and suddenly he had right side weakness, periods of incoherence, and what has become evident as short-term memory loss.

Now the tumor has become something that, if he is to survive, must be fixed. There are only a few places in the country that can do the surgery required, which involves threading a catheter through a blood vessel in his leg up into his brain, breaking up the tumor, and sucking it out a bit at a time.

The process is nightmarishly risky. Unbelievably expensive.

Not having the surgery, though, is a sure thing, in the worst of all possible ways.

And he has no health insurance, though he might yet be able to get it through work, and it might yet cover this condition. That remains to be seen.

Assuming he can’t, he and his folks are left hoping that a 9cm cavernous hemangioma in the brain, along with smaller hemangiomas, in a 34-year-old patient with few neurological symptoms (so far), and a history of leukemia as a kid, would be a rare enough and tempting enough case to interest a teaching hospital into taking him on for the education he would provide its medical students.