A Portrait of Carlotta

 Note to the reader: if you are brave enough to visit my town, vertigoville, pop.1, stroll down to the bottom of this blog, it reads better in a chronological manner.

Caution: side effects may include nausea, dizziness, and lost of innocence.

Long time I ago I learnt that sleep is like a frightened deer, the more you insist, the further it runs away.

 4 am and no sleep in the horizon, so I just gave up chasing the frightened deer and instead I netflixed Vertigo, the movie.

No doubt, Alfred Hitchcock was a genius and his take on the vertigo was a success, taking in consideration that the movie was made 54 years ago.

Basically, vertigo according to Mr. Hitchcock is some kind of phobia, a post traumatic reaction to Johnny’s lost of a partner; the fear of height was a synonymous of vertigo.  The master had an excuse; at least the movie is dated in the late 50s, but what about the health system in this time and age? And what about the skepticism of the people who deal with ‘’dizzy’’ people, and I mean the families, the friends, the colleagues and bureaucratic machine.

I heard so many stories about people, who were denied the right to ‘’be sick” by their families, by a jerk boss or some guy behind a government desk. People who were denied any kind of help, because they were considered fit to work and that vertigo is just some kind of light dizziness that can go away with a magic Advil pill or the other brand.

A lot of people finish by giving up, and just stop talking about their disease to the few people who did not desert them.

 I have talked with people who are afraid to talk even to their doctors about what they are going through, because they know that the health system is full of flaws and for lot of people out there, vertigo is but some form of depression, anxiety or some other mental reaction to everyday’s life stress.

I spent almost a year looking for some support group, some kind of a place where I can call or go and get a real and practical help, and not some B.S non sense and trust me on this, finding help is like chasing a frightened deer at 4 am. Good luck with that.

As far as I am concerned, I am going to continue chasing the deer and doing what I can to educate people about the dark sides of vertigo. I hope that in a near future, vertigo will acquire it status of a full time ‘body’ disease.