Revertigo

by Floyd Skloot

  Once I’d weaned myself from it, for the next three and a half years I kept the cane in our car, just in case. Then one morning, as Beverly and I were loading our bikes into the cargo area for an autumn ride along the river, I’d noticed my cane’s tip jutting from the cocoon of an old blanket tucked against the back seat. Yakking about the end of an era, feeling fully confident of my balance, I put the thing away at last, certain it was one of those moments I’d always remember. The Storing of the Cane.

  Except when you have brain damage, you can’t really be sure you’ll remember anything, ever. I know that, deep in my being. It’s why I have pens and pads in every room, in pockets, in the car. It’s why I’ve trained myself, over the twenty-two years since I got sick, to write notes all the time, lists, reminders, things-to-do, ideas, phrases or images I don’t want to lose. But I didn’t write down where I put the hazelwood cane, since I was confident its location was emblazoned in my memory by the momentousness of the occasion. Besides, the cane was now a memento rather than a necessity. I could let it go.

  Beverly and I had bought it together in Rapallo, Italy, during our honeymoon, to replace the stout oak cane I’d been using. With its long, thick, right-angled handle and slightly-too-long staff, its heaviness and density, the old cane had never felt comfortable. I’d picked it out before I understood what I really needed in a cane, and before I knew it would be with me for so long. When Beverly and I saw the pale, slender hazelwood cane propped in a shop window, we both smiled. Inside, we watched as the sweet old proprietor fit it perfectly to my five-foot-four frame, went into a back room to saw it down, and with an expression of deep sorrow, showed me the huge remnant he would be tossing away. This wasn’t just an appliance, it was a thing of beauty, light and graceful and gnarled, the bark partially peeled, the handle ending in a knob that became polished over time by the oils of my hand.

  Through those fifteen years when I needed the cane, my problem was a failure of my brain to assemble information about where I was in space, about what I saw or felt, about my body’s relationship to whatever place it was in. I could see just fine; my skin and nerves and muscles all functioned well enough; the delicate bones and hair cells of my inner ear worked. But my brain couldn’t properly sort what all these elements of the vestibular system were reporting. I’d fall sometimes when wind changed direction or when light flickered, when I reached the bottom—or occasionally the top—of a staircase, when landscape varied, patterns of floor coverings changed, or I was distracted by sound or movement. I might walk outside, savoring the spring air, and breathe in deeply, an action that sent me teetering backward. I’d squat to look at a freshly opened tulip, and fall into its embrace. Occasionally my world spun (vertigo) and occasionally my head spun (dizziness), the result of my brain being an inefficient machine for maintaining stability. I used to think Steve Martin could do a terrific routine about someone like me, deadly serious as he staggered and swooned and reeled through the world.

  So I’m familiar with how it feels to live without balance, how vertigo floods the whole body. How being off-kilter alienates you from the world, even from its most familiar and reliable spaces such as your home. But this time, my vertigo is more pronounced, less mingled with other symptoms, and more relentless.

  If vertigo came with a soundtrack, it would sometimes be train or trolley wheels grinding and screeching on tracks as the car turns and almost tips over. Other times it would be a treetop filled with the ruckus of rioting crows in a sudden windstorm. Helpless, untethered, I keep feeling the urge to reach out for something still and stable to steady me, but there’s too much give in everything. I move through my carnival world like the Human Bumper Car while the core sensation recalls the belly’s weightless hollow when a Ferris wheel plunges backward. If I weren’t so out-of-balance, I think, I could walk the line between queasy and nauseous with more authority. Moving my head, changing its plane, sets everything in motion. Discord rules.

  Not counting the two narrow closets in Beverly’s art studio, where I would never store anything, there are six closets in our house. Time is running out before we have to leave, but I check each one. Since looking up or down makes me wobble, I do a lot of reaching into corners, onto shelves, back against walls, while holding my head steady. I feel like a poorly maintained robot.

  The cane is not in my bedroom closet. It’s not in the linen closet (surprise!) or guest room closet where Beverly’s weaving materials are stored. It’s not in the tiny, triangular hall closet whose packed shelves fill all available space. It’s not in the pantry among the canned goods and vacuum cleaner and brooms and household tools. I check the downstairs closet by our front door again, because I’m still sure it’s there even though I couldn’t—and still can’t—find it, despite examining every inch. Neither could Beverly, who has been going through the closets too.

  On the way to our car, I inspect the garage systematically, all four corners, then along the walls, then up to the shelves that dangle from the ceiling, which makes me fall back against the door. Beverly takes my hand to steady me, and I see her eyes scan the space around the furnace, the recycling bins, the trash bucket.

  Caneless, I go to my doctor and am told that I have benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, or BPPV, caused most likely by a coxsackie virus that has attacked my inner ear. He’s seen four cases this week alone. He explains that ear rocks—small calcium carbonate crystals dislodged by the infection—have collected within my right inner ear. This debris, or otoconia, sends all sorts of confusing signals through the balance system, and until they dissolve I can expect the imbalance, vertigo, light-headedness, and nausea to continue. To last anywhere, he says, putting a hand on my shoulder, from two days to two months and, perhaps, to recur in the future.

  First thing I do when I get home is check all six closets again. Then I check them yet again. I do it slowly each time, fighting both vertigo and a growing sense of disbelief. I know the cane is here somewhere. It doesn’t make sense, and I’m going to keep looking until I find it. Because I’m tired of things in my environment not making sense already. ’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone, as Donne wrote in “An Anatomy of the World.” Reason, logic, systematic investigation, that’s what’s called for. A little coherence, please. I sense that I’m enacting a kind of behavioral vertigo with this reeling, zany pursuit, but can’t stop myself.

  I move the same coats, shoes, boxes, bathrobes, bedding, yarns, pillows, brooms, tools, cans, mailing tubes, fans, appliances, that I moved before. I feel along the same walls and same suspicious corners. There it is! No, that’s the umbrella I’ve mistaken for the cane three times now.

  On the second search, I work in the opposite direction, starting upstairs instead of downstairs, going through each closet from the right instead of the left, as though these shenanigans will make a difference in the outcome. Magical thinking. Which seems called for, since regular thinking isn’t getting the results I need. While I’m upstairs, Beverly is downstairs, re-rechecking closet and pantry, reporting her nonfindings.

  I forage through the garage again, frisking the wicker shelves where we store, folded over itself, the flowery-patterned cushion for our outdoor chaise longue; boxes of Christmas ornaments from Beverly’s childhood; boxes of candles; and recycled orange juice containers for Beverly’s basket-making dyes. I have no idea why I think the cane would be hidden in the bag where we keep our inflatable kayak, but I check anyway. No luck. The cane is also still not hidden behind the stepladder. Not behind the bicycles or the coat rack crowded with winter wear or the luggage, so it hasn’t relocated itself when I wasn’t looking.

  Since I can do nothing about the vertigo, since even lying down quietly doesn’t make it go away—in fact, makes it worse once I get up again—and since the simple and familiar order of a stable world is missing, I know I’m searching for something more than just a vanished cane here. I’m after control, after normalcy, clarity, an end to this dreamworld scenario. But I am also after the cane, and f
or a while I can keep justifying my mad, vertiginous, ongoing quest.

  After yet another fruitless round through the six closets, and after a desperate investigation of Beverly’s two sacrosanct art studio closets, I get into bed and settle back against a stack of five pillows to keep my head elevated. I read my Merck Manual’s understated, dull, utterly inadequate definition of vertigo: “an abnormal sensation of rotary movement associated with difficulty in balance, gait, and navigation of the environment.” But then it talks about “the hallucination of movement of the environment,” a notion accurately suggesting the sort of trippy, altered-state feeling I can’t shake. I read my Encyclopedia of Medicine: “astronauts in zero gravity experience vertigo when moving their heads.” Yes, zero gravity, that’s also what this feels like. Adrift in space. I reread a little of Scott McCredie’s Balance: In Search of the Lost Sense. He says that we depend on our balance system “not only for maintaining an upright posture, but for vision and even mental acuity,” which explains, perhaps, why I’ve been behaving so stupidly. When things are so wildly out of balance outside our heads, I think, things quickly get out of balance inside our heads too. I feel—after just one morning of this—as though I’m not myself. It’s a feeling I find echoed in Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, where he writes about a woman who lost the power of proprioception, the sense of her body’s whereabouts in space: “There is this specific, organically based, feeling of disembodiedness.” I’m disembodied, but also trapped in my body.

  None of this is particularly comforting. So I get up and start checking closets again.

  Beverly and I are doing The Epley Maneuver. Named after Oregon ear surgeon John Epley, who invented the technique nearly thirty years ago, it involves a series of four precise head movements intended to relocate the inner ear debris that causes symptoms in people with BPPV. The Particle Repositioning Procedure. We read about it online, watched a couple of YouTube demonstrations, and called my doctor to ask if he thought it would help. He did. Or, to be more precise about his phrasing, he thought it might not hurt.

  Now I’m lying back on our bed, head turned to the right and dangling off the edge into Beverly’s hands. This makes me even dizzier, but the feeling passes as Beverly waits thirty seconds, then shifts my head to the left. After another thirty seconds, I rotate onto my left side, face down, and look at Beverly’s kneecap. When another thirty seconds pass, I slowly sit up and gather myself for a full minute, trying not to puke. Repeat three times a day.

  At least we’re doing something! I’ve already implemented The Don’t Sleep on the Right Side Program. Now we follow The Epley Maneuver with The Ginger Tea Operation, to calm my stomach. Then Beverly gets out her acupuncture needles. She’d studied the practice for a year, during the time she was a licensed massage therapist, and we’re both confident that her treatments can help ease my symptoms.

  After all this, I feel sure I’ll be able to find my cane. Because while I was lying in bed with needles in my hands, arms, legs, and the top of my head, I had a vision: the cane was in plain sight, blending with its surroundings like a cuttlefish. It was camouflaged; that’s why I couldn’t find it.

  I check beside, behind, and underneath every piece of wooden furniture. In the space between the wall and the six-shelf bookcase in our bedroom, I find my old wooden baseball bat, the one I kept beside our bed for security when we lived in the woods for thirteen years. Too heavy, short, and awkwardly shaped for a cane. Under the futon in our guest bedroom, I find a few tangles of thin reed Beverly uses to make baskets. In the two-inch gap between my desk and wall, I find a missing coaster and a small ruler. The almost-cane-shaped thing behind the family room credenza is still our fireplace poker, still made of metal, still black, still not my cane.

  I’m beginning to understand what Samuel Beckett meant when he wrote of a man who spangled the butterflies of vertigo. I’m flitting; the world sparkles me dizzy as nothing holds still, and the vertigo increases as I whirl around in pursuit of stability. I also grasp what Charles Baudelaire said in early 1862, after suffering continually from vertigo: “I have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me.” It’s not just that vertigo’s symptoms are driving me crazy, they reveal the madness of a world that no longer makes sense. All is illusion. What is stillness but another illusion, since Earth is always in motion? This feeling that all is illusion, that stillness is really just another form of motion, must be why Milan Kundera said, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, that vertigo “is the voice of the emptiness below us.”

  It’s nearing noon. Time for the next Epley Maneuver. Beverly positions the pillow and clock, kneels, and tells me to lean back. Cupping my head in her hands, she looks down and asks how I’m doing. I feel the breath of her voice over my face. That’s when I start to cry.

  I feel engulfed by gratitude for her love and tenderness, for the great good fortune of not being alone as I deal with this. But also, having felt both physical and behavioral vertigo, I’m now feeling emotional vertigo. I’m swamped. This is good, I know it is, but crying just makes my head feel more clogged and imbalanced.

  When I sit up, Beverly gives me a tissue and I blow my nose. The shift in sinus pressure doesn’t make my vertigo vanish, but it does give me a sudden insight: I’ve been approaching the search for my cane, and thus for support, for stability, all wrong. Too much action—all the leaning and crouching and reaching keeps making me fall, which should have been a sign that I needed to find another way—and not enough looking.

  After lunch, I head to the garage. No matter how many times I think about it, this is the last place I can actually remember having the cane in my hands. I turn on the fluorescent lights, stand beside the car, and stare. My eye is caught by how much the patterned cushion folded up on our wicker shelving looks like camouflage, and that’s when I see the rounded tip of the cane’s cream-colored knob protruding from within the fold. It appears to be little more than a detail of the cushion’s flower shapes, barely a shade lighter than its surrounding fabric.

  My first thought is that there’s no way my cane could fit on that shelf. Am I really that short? It turns out that the cane measures thirty-two and a half inches from tip to knob, and the shelf measures thirty-two inches from its left rear corner to its right front edge. My cane was 98 percent swallowed up by the folded cushion. It turns out that I am that short.

  Like King Arthur with Excalibur, I withdraw the cane from its hold and heft it once. Though I’m not suddenly imbued with magical powers, and though the vertigo doesn’t vanish, I’m impressed with how familiar and comfortable it feels to have the cane’s support. Also with how confident it makes me feel, at last, that I’ll get through this, as though the cane were the missing piece of the arsenal, along with The Epley Maneuver and Beverly’s support and ginger tea and acupuncture and patience and time.

  Metaphors swarm. Though I may feel overwhelmed, swallowed up by vertigo like my cane was swallowed by the cushion, there’s a crucial piece of me where stability remains intact and available. The quiet center. And I know how to find it, how to lead myself there, where balance and harmony are to be found, even if I’m not aware that I’m doing so: I write, or if I can’t write I make notes, even if the notes are little more than single words or phrases, trying to understand what’s happening to me; I turn to Beverly; I phone my daughter. I gather what I need to keep myself together.

  The truth is, since the still world is always spinning, always in motion, our bodies and brains and minds work together to sustain the illusion of stability, to hold ourselves steady without thinking about it. That’s our system of balance at work, attuned, flexible, silent, in the background. But our hold is tenuous, and not guaranteed. In this sense, I’ve come to see my encounters with vertigo and dizziness, with illnesses that strike at the core of my balance, as a peek beyond the familiar dimensions of my grip on earth. Or perhaps behind the curtain, or through the magician’s cloak, since all that holds us in place is really just a tri
ck of eye, ear, skin, muscle, and bone.

  The cane doesn’t fix me, but it helps hold me in place. Being able to walk more confidently enables me to feel less helpless and to avoid additional fall-related injury. After a month, though the symptoms persist and I’m still reeling, I imagine celebrating someday as I put my cane back in a place I will never forget. I try to remain hopeful. We continue doing The Epley Maneuver three times a day.

  It takes another month to realize that, since The Epley Maneuver isn’t resolving the problem, the problem might not be caused by BPPV.

  10

  * * *

  SWAY ME SMOOTH

  Soundtrack for an MRI of the Brain

  I Like to Move It

  “Don’t move,” the technician named Molly says. Then she squeezes my ankle and leaves the room. Move? I’m supine, with a thick white semicircular cage locked across my entire face. Rubber chocks immobilize my neck and head on a table so narrow I think one deep breath could topple me. Even if I weren’t still dizzy. But I’ve been dizzy nonstop now for thirteen weeks and six days. When I lie, sit, stand. When I look up or down, left or right. When wind stirs the maple leaves outside my bedroom window or birds fly by or images flash on the television screen. I can’t drive, still need a cane, have fallen in grocery stores and on sidewalks. And now I’m in a remodeled former cake factory, about to be drawn into the bore of a giant magnet. The magnet will force the hydrogen atoms in my brain to line up neatly, then bombard them with radio waves so a computer can identify what’s causing the problem in my brain or inner ear. Movement is something I’m no longer good at, and no longer do without careful planning. So okay, Molly, I won’t move.