I spent much of Saturday afternoon in Urgent Care due to severe vertigo. It had only happened to me once before a couple of years ago when I was in NorCal visiting college roommie Diana, but I didn’t care to ever go thru that again. Like that makes a difference. I stumbled a bit Saturday morning after putting in my contacts, but I figured my eyes just needed to adjust to the contacts for whatever reason. I then proceeded to drive to WalMart to buy a laundry hamper. The road was spinning around my head and I felt off-kilter. I suddenly recognized this as a mild version of the first time. I managed to get thru WalMart fairly normally and drive home (altho upon exiting the car and walking, I did fall left back into it), taking good care to leave space cushions around me on the road. Mr. W thought it may be dizziness due to sugar low, so I had a bowl of cereal and felt a little better. We then plopped on the couch to watch some Ally McBeal. Some time went by and when I sat up again, the spinning was back, and worse. He tried to convince me I needed medical attention as I tried to convince him I was fine. To prove my point, I got up to continue my laundry chores, but in transferring clothes from the washer to the dryer, everything spun so severely I had to brace myself against the washer and try hard to focus on one point, and even then the dizziness got me so nauseated I wobbled upstairs to the bathroom and hugged the toilet, breathing erratically, waiting for the cereal to make its way back up. As soon as I sat still, leaning my head sideways against the tub, I felt better. Things were still moving on their own, but at least the nausea was gone. I pulled myself up to look in the mirror. The motion alone brought the spinning sickness back and I observed I’d never seen my face and lips so colorless. I slumped back down. Mr. W found me in the bathroom like that a few minutes later and this time when he insisted I needed to go to Urgent Care, I was too weak to deny it.

At the hospital, the nurse weighed me (I apparently lost weight since being flakey on the gym the past few months, which could only mean I lost muscle mass, damn it — at least I returned to the gym on Friday), took my blood pressure (108/69, pulse 64), checked my oxygen saturation (98%). All vital signs looked normal, healthy even, as usual. I was sent back to wait in the lobby for the doctor. Hours went by and the spinning lessened until I was comfortable walking steadily to the restroom on my own. When the doctor finally saw me, though, he gave me a lot of time and very thorough testing. Mr. W saw that as an opportunity to rat on me to the emergency doctor. “She doesn’t eat breakfast, doesn’t eat lunch, and works out at the gym at lunchtime. She only eats once a day. She won’t listen to me!” I gave him a flat look. The doctor (as other doctors before him) didn’t seem concerned with my level of nutrition, especially after I told him I start every weekday morning with a hot mug of chia seeds in water. He checked my reflexes, walking, balance, took blood pressure laying down, sitting, and standing (pretty minimal changes), checked in my ears (no inner ear infection) and nose (passed the booger test). Then he had this tuning fork thing he put on various parts of my body to ask if I could feel and/or hear it. And then, Mr. W thought he’d pipe in and tattle on me about my recent omnipresent breathing difficulties and tried to relate it to malnutrition. The doctor looked over my past medical records on the computer, going back 6 years. Then he took an ECG (my heart’s normal, too) and listened to my lungs. So here’s his bottom line:

Looking at the progression of data from past blood tests to present, I apparently am dehydrated. This is why in such an otherwise normal healthy person, my sodium and potassium are in the high-normal range. Concentrated blood. He said this is also the reason why my pulse and blood pressure are so low (and I thought it was just cuz I’m athletic). He also noted that in more recent blood tests compared to before, my kidney function has gone down gradually, and he attributes their not doing as much filtering to that I’m not supplying them the tool with which they filter things — water. He asked what color my urine usually is. I couldn’t tell him, considering I pee probably twice or three times a day so I don’t notice. He balked. Now I’m QUITE dehydrated. Having ruled out everything else, he diagnosed the dizziness as Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo (calcium stones that detect balance float on fluid in the inner ear, and when one’s dehydrated, the fluid level drops), and gave me a printout of Care Instructions for the next time this happens. Apparently you just do Brandt-Daroff exercises, really easy stuff. You sit on the edge of a bed or something, and lay down quickly to the side that causes vertigo (for me, this time I fell left). Stay there with that ear flat on the bed at least 30 seconds as the vertigo subsides, then sit up. If vertigo is still there, go quickly down on the opposite side. If things spin then, wait for it to stop, then flop back to the 1st side. You just do this like 10 times. I guess it dislodges the little calcium stones that perceive balance in your inner ear or something. For the nausea, he recommends over-the-counter anti-motion-sickness medication meclizine, which we already have at home as Mr. W’s Disneyland roller coaster rides excuse-eliminator.

Now here’s the interesting part. As for my breathing difficulties, which I described to him as feeling like my lungs won’t expand when I breathe so I respond by taking deeper and deeper breaths until I’m lightheaded, he could find no organic cause. So he thinks it’s psychological. I said the other doctor there had diagnosed it as GERD. He doesn’t think it’s GERD. He said being full may put some pressure upward but that it shouldn’t impact my diaphragm to where I feel like it won’t expand outward. He thinks I’m having unconscious anxiety attacks. But I’m not stressed or anxious, I tell him, and even Mr. W agreed. He said to start writing down what I was doing when I find myself gasping for air, and note what I was thinking right before. I tell him it’s usually immediately after I’ve eaten that I have symptoms, sometimes I’m just sitting there after eating, watching TV, when I start the breathing struggle, hence GERD, right? He still didn’t think so. He said it’s likely a more deeply rooted issue than a conscious awareness of something that causes me stress or anxiety, or I’d have stopped the trigger myself by now. So a new theory was born.
Maybe the anorexia has come back, but only subconsciously. I’m so (subconsciously) freaked out that I’d overeat and get fat, that I don’t eat often, and when I do, the feeling of fullness triggers guilt, and that guilt triggers an anxiety attack that gives me the only consciously noticeable symptom: difficulty breathing. Hmm.

Today, Sunday, I was involved in a major furniture exchange. My parents gave me their current newish dining room set, I gave our too-large dining set to my aunt’s family, gave my parents our credenza, matching coffee table, bookshelf, and gave Kevin and his U$C roommates our leather living room couches (I visited enemy territory on Trojan turf for the first time today — can the place USE any more bricks?! It looks like the 3rd little pig put the campus together.). Our new couches will be delivered on Tuesday (yay!). I was talking to my mom about my recent hospital visit, and it turns out she’s had acid reflux and vertigo for most of her life! “So it’s a genetic thing! So this is all YOUR fault!” I joked, pointing a finger at her. As a matter of fact, she’d even had a random attack of vertigo Saturday night right after I’d recovered from mine. “You passed it on to me! So this is YOUR fault!” she accused, pointing back at me. The last stop was my aunt’s house to deliver the dining table, and she had us all sit around it and kept feeding us tea and junk food. After all the furniture was delivered and exchanged, I drove home and found myself again gasping for breath in the car. It suddenly occurred to me to relax my diaphragm and stomach. My full tummy extended. And breathing got easier.
Oh.my.God. I didn’t even realize I was sucking in my stomach. Thinking about it, when do I most tend to suck in? When I’m full, cuz that’s when I feel fat with my protruding tummy. I also suck in when I’m sitting, because that’s when fat folds over (blech) and is the most obvious. So if I’m wearing fitted clothes, feeling fat, sitting at work, my diaphragm is constantly being restricted from expansion — by ME! I’m gonna test out this theory. So far I’ve ended two bouts of breathing issues tonight by forcing myself to relax my stomach. It’s not the most attractive thing in the world, but at least I can stop gasping. I’m not subconsciously anorexic; just subconsciously vain.