.

After feeling like utter crap for a week, my husband drug my sorry self to our health care providers office yesterday. Naturally my primary physician was unavailable, but they had one appointment open. With a new doctor who just started there.

Basically, he’d just started anywhere. He was a newbie, probably under 30 years old and freshly graduated from Dartmouth College. He was very nice, very polite and very thorough. With the symptoms he wanted to address.

As I said yesterday I’ve been experiencing a bit of dizziness but my main complaint has been constant stomach discomfort, nausea and crippling fatigue.

Though I told him the most I’d eaten at one time in the last week was half a piece of toast, he zeroed in on the dizziness and gave me a seriously bizarre neurological examination.

He put his hands on my cheeks and told me to press my tongue against them.

He had he me extend one palm upward and flap the other hand back and forth against it as fast as I could.

I told him I’d had bouts of vertigo on and off my entire life, but that wasn’t why I was there.

Didn’t matter, he was off to the races and had me do balance tests, positional transition tests and a bunch of other nonsense that triggered my vertigo and made me feel worse.

Diagnosis?

Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo.

(The simple explanation-

BPPV happens because there’s a problem deep inside your ear where your balance is controlled. Tiny calcium particles in your inner ear get loose and float around where they don’t belong. This causes symptoms. 

The particles shift around when you move your head in certain ways, such as rolling over in bed or bending over to pick something up.)

He seemed pleased, and set me up with referrals to a therapist who apparently has exercises and manipulations to restore the loose rocks in my head.

Great.

And what about my other issues?

As he was shuffling me out the door, I had to beg him to do blood tests to see if any of my vitamin levels were off or I if had anemia because this fatigue is insane. He was completely uninterested in my stomach issues and suggested I might have picked up a virus somewhere. Basically, he poo pooed my weeklong discomfort as unimportant and told me to eat bland foods for two weeks.

So I’m home. Not feeling one bit better and without any more idea of what’s going on than before.

Ugh.

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