Today is Sunday, October 15 and there are only 71 days until Christmas.  By now you should be playing Christmas music while you start writing your cards and those holiday letters that everyone just “loves” to get each year.  Today we remember the birthdays of Virgil Mantua, Friedrich Nietzsche and Mario Puzo.  On this day in 1520 King Henry VIII of England ordered bowling lanes at Whitehall, in 1878 Edison Electric Company was incorporated and in 1966 LBJ signed a bill creating the Department of Transportation.  In French Guiana it is Cayenne Holiday, in Tunisia it is Evacuation Day and in the US it is National Cheese Curd Day and National Grouch Day.

This past week has been interesting.  I spent almost a full day in the ER recently, suffering from an attack of vertigo.  As a result, I was initially given medication that made me want to sleep all the time.  I guess the thinking was that if I was sleeping, I wouldn’t be able to get up and be dizzy.  I took that for a day or two, but decided to go to my primary care doctor to see if there was a better way to solve this than to sleep for several weeks.  I will admit, there are times when sleeping for days at a time sounds attractive, but I do have things planned so I really needed to be able to move around.

My form of vertigo – Benign Positional Vertigo – results when crystals in the ear canal shift into the wrong position.  Episodes usually occur when the head is moved in a certain way.  This can happen when turning in bed, bending or looking up.  When I saw that it could occur when turning in bed I wondered how the doctor thought giving me a drug that made me very sleepy was a good way to deal with vertigo.  In any event, it took almost all day in the ER for them to confirm what the doctor initially said when she first examined me.  Of course, they had to do a number of tests, take x-rays and take blood.  Let me say that it is rather disturbing when the doctor comes in and says, “We did a CT scan of your brain and didn’t find anything.”  That’s odd.  I was pretty sure I had one when I came in.

It was very busy in the ER that day and they had people everywhere, including in the halls.  I was fortunate enough to be in a room.  At one point, there was a man who was set up in the hallway and he had a direct view into the room I was in.  I was lying there watching TV and chatting with Barbara.  To look at me, you wouldn’t think there was anything wrong, as long as I didn’t try to stand up.  I could tell that the guy in the hall was annoyed that I had a room and he didn’t.  He got even more annoyed when Barbara returned from the hospital café with a sandwich and a cup of Starbucks coffee for me.  They finally told me, again, that I had vertigo, gave me my prescription and sent me on my way.

One of the papers they gave me told me to follow up with my primary care doctor in a couple days, which I did.  My primary is not big on taking medications if there is a better way to deal with a problem.  She did some standard tests like “touch your nose and then touch my finger” and “follow my finger with your eyes” and other fun stuff.  She explained that vertigo is caused by the movement of these crystals and that she would be able to help me with that.  I thought, “Great!  She’ll get these things cleared and everything will be good.”  Not as easy as it sounded.  Without going into great details, let me just say that if I ever have the problem again, I think I will take the pills rather than go through that. 

The upside was that it seemed to do the trick.  The down side was that for at least the next week, there were certain things I could not do.  One of them was look down.  You have no idea how often you look down during a day until someone tells you that you can’t.  Try putting on socks or tying shoes without looking down.  Try putting on pants!  I have talked in the past how the inanimate object gremlins mess with me when I am getting dressed.  Now, suddenly, I can’t look to see what they have done.  How about going to the bathroom?  As a guy, one of my options is to stand, but now I can’t look to see if I am on target and can only hope for audible evidence that I am.  So sit down you say.  Fine, but I can’t look down to make sure I am hovering in the right location before landing.  Then of course, I have to grope for my clothing before standing up, because I am not supposed to bend, either.  

Another issue is that I have to sleep with two pillows because I am not supposed to lie flat.  I do not sleep well with two pillows and have never liked the idea of using two.  The doctor was able to determine that my right side was where the issue was.  So I was also told to avoid rolling onto that side and to not lean to that side when getting out of bed.  I won’t bore you with the various small problems that I had to work out because of that.  The big issue is that for me to get out of bed, I have to go to my right.  So now I have to move to my left, sit up and then swing around to my right to get off the bed.  The fun just never quits, or at least it won’t for another couple days.

If it were up to me, I would have had the crystals removed and used them to make jewelry.  I would have taken the pills and just laid around the house sleeping for a couple weeks, waking long enough to eat, go to the bathroom, shower occasionally and change my shirt every few days.  You ever notice that things like that are never up to you?

This week our fact tells us that the dark meat on a roast turkey has more calories than the white meat.  I mention this so that more people will eat the white meat, leaving the dark meat for me.  I don’t care about calories, as long as I don’t have to look down or roll to my right to get them.