that time when i couldn't walk in a straight line

On Wednesday morning, my body felt ridiculously heavy when I woke up. Sort of like when you're standing on that carnival ride that looks like a hamster wheel on its side, and it spins you so fast that it's hard to lift your head from the back of the grate.

When I finally managed to get out of bed, I stumbled into/fell on top of a pile of Alan's gear on my way to the bathroom, and as I brushed my teeth and walked into the living room, I started saying, "Alan! Alan! I can't walk straight." He, of course, seemed to find this amusing and helped me sit down, because even though I was aiming for the kitchen, I couldn't walk straight and ended up on the couch.

He told me that I got out of bed too quickly, and soon my dizziness passed, so I didn't think much of it anymore.

Until I tried walking back into the bathroom to put my toothbrush away, ran into a wall, and fell (my brain didn't seem to realize that walking faster would not get me to the bathroom faster, if my body didn't want to walk that way). The running into a wall bit is actually not that uncommon (I run into doorknobs and doorways and plants and all sorts of things every day), but falling down because I've hit a wall that hard? Can't say that's ever happened before.

And then my nausea turned to vomiting, and then he called the nurse advice line, and then they asked if we could go to the emergency room. NO, we cannot go to the emergency room! Emergency rooms are for emergencies--like I hacked off my finger with a kitchen knife, or I've been severely injured in a car accident, or I burned half of my body when I was cooking.

So, we went to the emergency room.

Where I was diagnosed with some sort of vertigo. It's called BPPV, and the worst part is that there's no identified cause and it can happen again. And, the pills they gave me for nausea and dizziness make me so tired that I couldn't believe it was only 11 a.m. the following morning, because I slept about 12 hours and wanted to go right back to sleep as soon as I woke up. On the upside, there was a very short wait, I was diagnosed pretty quickly, and the entire staff was pretty attentive and they knew what they were doing.