For Room Spinning

So, I’m going to see how long I can go today without medication. I’ve got two pills—one for nausea and one for “room spinning” (that’s literally what the bottle says: take 1-2 pills up to three times a day for room spinning). The nausea one is not supposed to knock me out, and the room spinning one is, so I’ve been taking the nausea one first and seeing how I do on just that. Thing is, the past few days I’ve just fallen asleep before I can even determine whether I need the second pill. Either the first medicine is knocking me out anyway, or my body just finds dizziness rather exhausting.

I spent almost the entire weekend in bed, except for meals and a visit with Stephen and Sandy on Saturday (which I cut short with an abrupt crash and a “Take me home now, please” before we could even get to dessert—which is the way to tell whether I’m really sick or faking it, because I’ll suffer almost anything for dessert) and a trip to church on Sunday. Thank goodness for the 6:00 p.m. service, which gave me the entire day to sleep and drum up enough energy to venture out.

I’ve been banished from the kitchen, after burning my arm with hot grease while trying to sear a rack of lamb (admittedly not my smartest decision, but it was one of those almost-expired half-off sales, and I love rack of lamb). I’ve broken a vase and knocked over a glass of water, but I’m a fairly clumsy person anyway, so who’s to say it was the vertigo that caused those…

It’s hard to describe the feeling. Sometimes, I feel like I’m sitting on a trampoline that someone else is jumping on. Sometimes, while walking, I suddenly feel two feet shorter than I am. Sometimes it’s like getting out of the car after a long drive and still feeling the momentum, the forward motion. Sometimes I feel like I’m either too big or too small for my head, like I am floating a little above myself or have sunk deeper inside.

It’s funny, my reaction to things like this. I’ve no patience for it, and having to lie around in bed all day when I’ve got a long post-trip to-do list waiting for me is quite maddening, but perhaps there’s something to learn in all of this. Like, can I honestly say that suffering is part of life and then arrange my life with the highest goal being the avoidance of suffering? If suffering is part of life, and I want to experience life, then I will experience suffering, and I can either struggle under it and buck against it or accept it, go with it, experience it as fully as possible. I never appreciate health more than right after an illness. And, let’s get real here, this is not that bad.

I’ve been trying to dwell on all the upsides, and there are quite a few. For starters, I’d much rather be sick here than in Congo. So, the fact that this waited long enough for me to get in my own bed, in my air-conditioned house, with my doctor a short drive away and a pharmacy within minutes from my house, that’s a pretty good thing. And maybe I needed this, needed a time of stop of be still and it struck me yesterday that my physical state matches in some way with my mental state. The swirling thoughts, something brewing, I feel a little stirred up, and in a way it’s kind of interesting to see physical and mental line up that way.

There are so many thoughts to think. I tried to put some of them in sentences yesterday, but I don’t remember them.

Well, enough of this. There’s a stack of paperwork on the floor of my office I’m going to attempt. But if that doesn’t work out, I’ll just take the medicine and go to bed and sleep and dream and that will be nice too.