Vertiginousness

I hope this isn't some kind of new disability ummmm

Two days ago, we ordered Chinese food for dinner and received it in greater abundance than we had planned, so we had a lot of leftovers, including leftover rice, which I made into fried rice yesterday. Nothing newsworthy there, because I’m not very good at the sacred practice of making fried rice: I got the pan hot with sesame oil, put in the rice with an egg, stirred it all around and added fish sauce — and, where I would usually add peas, I threw in lima beans instead because there were no peas — and where I would usually add sardines from our pillars of canned fish well-stocked at all times, I didn’t add anything, because lima beans have protein and I felt like eating a pile of fried rice?

It was a fine meal for solo enjoyment, but nothing I would make for you. Something very, very strange happened when I was doing the dishes after, though:

My stomach lurched in that top-of-Disneyland’s-Tower-of-Terrors sort of way. It’s a way that, experience-wise, I quite like — the Tower of Terrors has long been my favorite ride at Disneyland, because I care nothing for spins but I love a good drop, and that’s all that ride is — a slow, anticipatory ride upwards, long enough for you to regret your life choices, and a stomach-in-your-mouth drop for I don’t remember how long, because it’s been decades since I’ve Disneylanded. (The workers are allowed to have visible tattoos now!)

But my point is, I thought, “Hmm, free pleasurable altered state,” before I started to worry. Then I got very dizzy. And I didn’t feel like I could comfortably stand.

I laid down in my living room, I drank water, I did all manner of sensible things, but this dizziness only got worse, accompanied by a steady nausea that also refused to abate. So I made an appointment with our conveniently close Urgent Care and took a walk in the mocking San Francisco cold of May. The forms I filled out in the doctor’s office set my mind at ease: I had no neurological symptoms, double vision or any of that. When I described my symptoms in more detail to the physician, she said, “You’re experiencing your first-ever episode of vertigo.”

That word makes me think of two things: the classic Hitchcock film, and this pop song by the LA band Phases:

I think about that movie and that song often enough that I kinda forgot that vertigo is a real thing. Well, I’m aware of it now, because it’s had me in its whirling clutches since yesterday afternoon. I need to call about the prescription I was supposed to get if it doesn’t go away: it is not going away. I was also referred to an ear nose and throat specialist who my physician gushed about, but it turns out he doesn’t take my insurance.

I’m not worried, but I do have some time before our triumphant departure almost a month-to-the-day from now, so I’ll make sure I’m squared away in some fashion to hit the road. for days. across the whole of the country. again.

It’s good to be us — Ian and me, I mean — even if the dizzying heights and overwhelming depths of this past 5 months had to go and make themselves literal.

From the title sequence of, perhaps regrettably, my favorite Hitchcock film