The orphan disease

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.

Don’t get me wrong, being sick sucks, but all diseases aren’t created equal.

   First day of vertigo is weird; you don’t know what hit you. Is it a stroke? Is it deficiency in some alphabetical vitamin or nutrient? Is it a mere reaction to stress, or exhaustion?

  Day 2, you take whatever the doctors say, probably some infection that won’t last long, and a treatment with antibiotics is the solution.

Day 3, you know you have been sick before and it was not that bad so, you go back to your routine; work, school, or whatever you used to do before you were interrupted by vertigo/infection/an exhaustion episode.

Day 4 vertigo proves you wrong. It obliges you to take it more seriously, it demands more respect. After all, it is not your common infection and the journey is going to be long and, if you are not lucky enough, a very lonely one.

Then, you would see more doctors, they would prescribe more drugs, and they would send you to see more specialized doctors, who would send for more MRIs, CT scans, ECGs,EKGs…by then you would lose your job, you would not remember the last time you left your bed, and the dizziness would be a daily occurrence.

I am no doctor but I can assure you that there is a rule in medicine; when drugs don’t work and the all the imagery abbreviations are negative, doctors get skeptical.

When doctors see that vertigo/dizziness/swaying/rocking…refuse to respond to their medication and start to act like a stubborn teenager, they just give up.

‘Maybe it is just in your head” is doctor’s way to say, I can’t cure you and I am going to send you to SEE SOMEONE, it’s easier this way! They try to come up with simplistic diagnosis: you are stressed (who is not), exhausted (come again!), or some other non sense medical lingo…

Then, lo and behold! Your vertigo is getting worse, your doctor is in denial, and your ship is sinking and the rats have long gone AWOL.

After a couple of days of depression and hopelessness, you try to stand up, anyways, you have to, it is not like you have lot of choices. You start by looking for people like you, people in the same condition and you hope one of them would have the answer to your nagging questions. Lack of experts, you would try to create one.

Then you would stumble upon some web sites, you would spill you guts, you would read others’ stories and it would help. In a world where the support groups and associations are plentiful, you would discover that there is not lot of support groups, associations or real help for you, you struck the wrong disease, the orphan among orphans.

You would fantasize about creating a group or an association to educate people about this disease but that would be a project for another day.

The voyage would be long. Patience and action plans are the key words.

PS: if you are reading this and you are suffering from vertigo or any of its variants, please do something, don’t stay in your corner suffering alone. If writing is not too hard for you, send comments, ask or give advice, the same applies to you those who are brave enough not to abandon the ship. You are all welcome!