Dizzy in the head

Picture: 20th Century Fox

Life, eh? Waking up last Friday morning, I was contemplating a sombre day ahead, taking my mother to the funeral of a neighbour who’d died just a few months shy of her 100th birthday. It was a contrast to the previous evening when I received potentially good news on the employment front (details soon!), but as I affixed my black tie, adjusted my black raincoat and tightened the laces of my jet black shoes, I found myself ‘getting in to part’.

By early afternoon, however, I was wobbling about at the wake, unable to walk straight or even drive my mum home. The obvious conclusion here - and, no doubt, the observation of fellow mourners - was that I was ‘the one’ who always goes a bit too far on the free booze at these affairs and was making a tit of himself.

With my girlfriend, who just happened to be on half term school holiday (she’s a teacher), able to pick us up, I returned home and, after a brief stop to make a colourful and quite loud call on the great white telephone, went to bed. And stayed there. Out cold. For several hours. Even managed to miss my other half go off to the O2 with her daughter to see The 1975, a gig I’d been looking forward to myself. Worse was to come on Saturday morning when it was clear I wasn’t well enough to go to Stamford Bridge for Chelsea’s encounter with Spurs, a fixture I never miss and have even flown halfway around the world to attend in the past. I ended up watching from the sofa through the one eye that could maintain focus (and still did better than VAR...) thanks to whatever had rendered me not only vertiginous but also boss-eyed. What a state.

So, Monday morning (let’s write off Sunday as a day of exclusively pyjama-clad telly watching via the Cyclops eye). Uber to the rescue to take me the 0.4 miles to the doctor’s surgery I only joined two weeks ago. Paging Mr. H.P. Chondriac! I joke, but I had an over-dependence on the medical profession once before: 14 years ago, when I lived in the Netherlands, I was diagnosed with a condition that made me paranoid. Not in the strictest, psychological sense, but to the extent that the slightest heartbeat louder than it should have been, cough that felt richer than normal, or blurred vision (i.e. just waking up), had me down the local quack faster than you could say “Call the midwife”. Thus, I’ve been wary since of tugging any Sawbones’ chain since for fear of unnecessarily declaring the sky to be falling.

On this particular Monday morning, however, I thought there was no other option. Sudden dizziness in a 52 year old is not something to be taken lightly, even if my outward mood didn’t seem to have been affected by whatever lurgy I’d succumbed to. This was probably much to my girlfriend’s annoyance as I was still capable of making awful jokes with lucid judgement. I just wasn’t capable of hauling myself off the sofa all day yesterday for fear of falling over. You can see her point of view.

Anyway, to the doc’s I went this morning, to be diagnosed with BPPV - benign paroxysmal positional vertigo - a temporary condition involving the inner ear suddenly getting confused and making one dizzy and unsteady. Causes are vague, but lack of sleep or stress can be a factor. I was, he said, absolutely right to come in and get checked out. Obviously, I am mightily relieved that it was nothing more serious (Larry David-style, I’d assumed it was a stroke or the sudden onset of a brain tumour - guess that’s why GPs train for 10 years before entering practice...). It’s going to be an interesting week while it works itself out, especially convincing the neighbours that the giddy clot not leaving the house until mid-morning and then wobbling down the street like one of the Geordie Shore cast on a night out is not, as might appear, already Brahms and Liszt, but is just heading, trepidatiously, to Nero’s for a latte.