Tumbled

I’m starting to get used to the vertigo now. It’s been going on for all day for the last month, and it’s hard to remember a time when the world hasn’t seemed like I’m watching it from inside a dryer.

Chronic illness is nothing new around our house, and Thing1 set a really high bar for accepting fate with graceful determination when he got his ulcerative colitis diagnosis a few years ago. I watched his experience, and, I know that, no matter how you handle it, a chronic illness means chronic, not curable.

Last Tuesday I had an injection of steroid into my inner ear that hopefully well control the symptoms for a few months at a time, putting the disease into remission. Forty-eight hours later, there were breaks in the tumbling until I torpedoed my success with too much salt which led to a hangover on Thursday. When the hangover began to recede, my first sensation was exhaustion. After a 20 minute nap, however, I felt like a towel that had been pulled out of the dryer and hung on the line, fluttering with my second or third wind.