I was diagnosed some years ago with BPPV — Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo.
With me, it generally starts with slight dizziness that gets worse over a day or two, becoming so bad that I have to have my husband hold me up to get from one end of the house to the other.
There are a bunch of exercises you’re supposed to do to get the little positional elements in your inner ears back where they belong… and NONE of them worked for me.
So a couple days ago I started getting dizzy again, for the first time in several years, and by the end of yesterday, I could not move. Sitting up, lying down, turning my head…all of it was impossible. Lying still with my eyes closed, I STILL felt like I was falling off a building and accelerating toward the ground.
Enter Matt, who is very good at finding and fixing problems.
I didn’t even bother to search the Internet, because I’d been to the specialist, I’d been given the sheet of exercises to do, I’d done them (correctly and regularly), and they did NOTHING.
When Matt said, “I searched the Internet and found something I think will help — an exercise you could do that doesn’t involve flinging yourself backward on the bed,” I was dubious. But he showed me the video he found, and the doctor who came up with the procedure demonstrated how she’d thought it up (if I can see the reasoning behind something, I’m a lot more willing to try it).
It worked.
I went from, “I’m going to be trapped in bed for a week with my eyes shut (at its worst, the vertigo is so bad I can’t even read or look around while lying down) and being half-carried to the bathroom” to…
“Hey. It’s gone!”
And I’m fine today. Was a little dizzy when I first got up, so I did the exercise once. And even the little dizziness is gone.
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