Most people look at YouTube videos when they want a laugh, or to hear a particular song, or to follow important societal events like OWS. Did you know that there are YouTube videos posted by every kind of professional imaginable? Instructional videos that will teach you everything from how to fix a leaky faucet to how to properly stretch your hamstrings? Follow me below the squiggle while I describe how YouTube cured my vertigo.
Note carefully: I am not a doctor and I do not recommend you self-diagnose with the assistance of Dr. Google. The internet is useful and informative under the best of circumstances; misleading and downright wrong and potentially dangerous under other circumstances. Still, we all use it to search for information. I'm sharing this experience as a teaching tool about BPPV, benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, arguably the most common cause of dizziness. This is one of those "don't do as I did; do as I say" moments.
KosAbility is a community diary series posted at 5 PM ET every Sunday and Wednesday by volunteer diarists. This is a gathering place for people who are living with disabilities, who love someone with a disability, or who want to know more about the issues surrounding this topic. There are two parts to each diary. First, a volunteer diarist will offer their specific knowledge and insight about a topic they know intimately. Then, readers are invited to comment on what they've read and or ask general questions about disabilities, share something they've learned, tell bad jokes, post photos, or rage about the unfairness of their situation. Our only rule is to be kind; trolls will be spayed or neutered.
Every morning I lie flat on my back on the floor to do stretching exercises. About a week ago I got hideously dizzy every time I did that and turned my head to the right. The Mayo Clinic defines vertigo as the sudden sensation that you're spinning or that your head is spinning inside. Vertigo is worse than dizziness; the symptoms are a spinning sensation of your body or the world around you, often combined with nausea, vomiting, blurred vision, earache, loss of balance, trouble standing still and trouble walking.
I was lucky. As soon as I turned my head the spinning stopped. I could completely avoid getting dizzy by changing the position of my head - not a permanent solution, of course, but one I could live with. My attitude quickly changed a few nights later when I awakened with a full bladder, jumped out of bed to go to the bathroom, and staggered so badly I almost fell. This wouldn't do at all!
In the morning I found a vertigo algorithm and, after extensive reading, determined I most likely had something called benign paroxysmal positional vertigo. More reading introduced me to a very effective treatment for BPPV, the canalith repositioning procedure. I also discovered that many patients who develop BPPV are so overwhelmed by the severity of their symptoms that they take to their beds for extended periods of time, in such despair that they're never diagnosed.
How sad is that? The most common cause of vertigo, yet most of us don't know anything about it!
My reading also determined that my chiropractor, whom I see weekly for physical therapy updates, could most likely do this canalith repositioning procedure. In the meantime, I discovered and watched a YouTube video demonstrating “canalith repositioning procedures”:
Watching that I thought, "That doesn't look too hard. I wonder if I can do that myself?" I did my best to reproduce what I’d seen on YouTube – and I’ll be damned if I didn’t fix my own problem! My vertigo immediately disappeared and has not returned in the five days since. Perhaps best of all, I know what to do if it does return.
I had second (and third and fourth and fifth) thoughts about writing this up for KosAbility. I know someone will give me hell for diagnosing and treating myself. What finally tipped the scales and brought me here can be found in all that reading I did: BPPV is the leading cause of vertigo. If some of you are already hanging your heads off the end of the bed and trying it out, the worst that can happen is it won't work. The CRP is so safe that it's often used by doctors to rule out BPPV before ordering expensive diagnostic tests. Lots of you are uninsured, so seeing a doctor for vertigo may be out of reach, and forget paying for scans, specialists, and lab tests. If I can make your world stop spinning or send you back to the algorithm for another answer, I'll take my lumps.