Sitting at my desk, working away on some layout, I began to have a real problem tracking what I was doing. After an hour of this, I pushed in the keyboard and stood up to take a break. Bad idea. After two days of increasingly hazardous trips to the toilet bowl, I was off to the doctor--where I learned there was a Latin medical term for "cause unknown."

Well, its more like the "trigger" for vertigo is the mystery. The cause is this: little bits of flotsam floating in the semi-circular canals of your inner ear bump around and fire off nerves that report to your brain where you are in space. Its a little like the bubble in a carpenters level only you have six of them: X, Y and Z on both sides. With vertigo, the itsy-bits in you ears have sunk or they're bopping where they shouldn't.

This is enough to overcome, but there's more. The worst vertigo has to offer is the result of the discrepancy between the ears--the organs of balance--and the eyes--the organs that trump all others. The ears say "We're rolling," the eyes say "We're not." This lack of corroboration leads to:

> nausea (think seasick...)
> headaches
> confusion
> inability to concentrate
> sensitivty to light and noise
> painful urination (wait, that's from something else...)
> and all manner of bumbling, fumbling and stumbling when you try to get around

Like a lot of illnesses, vertigo is self-limiting. Eventually it just goes away--or rather your balance is 'recalibrated.' Your brain spends a few days to a week trying to make sense of the mess coming from the inner ear, and eventually it figures out (almost literally) which way is up.

There are drugs you can take, and there are exercises you can try. I got a kick out the warning label for Meclizine, "May Cause Dizziness." And the exercises were like hopping onto the Tilt-a-Whirl at the county fair. "Turn your head this way, then flop back fast. Repeat until incapacitated." I had to opt for the therapy of least resistance: lie down and wait.

The prize for enduring the least fun one week on your back can offer: a newly acquired predisposition to... Vertigo!

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