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When I woke up to go to the bathroom in the wee hours of the morning, a recent Saturday morning, I knew something was wrong when I got out of bed. I could not find my balance and the room was spinning. it was like being really drunk, only I was completely sober. I bounced like a ping-pong ball from my bedroom to the bathroom, assuming that my mystery would have disappeared when I woke up.
But at 9 o'clock he was still there. All day Saturday, I had hoped that dizziness would pass. I went to my usual weekend activities, which unfortunately involved crossing a river by boat (not great for the head, I'm afraid). Sunday, I resigned myself to stay on the couch. In reviewing my symptoms, I noticed that the rotations seemed to have more thready"That's the proper medical term, I believe – every time I moved my head in such an abrupt way as to drop me on a pillow. Some superficial research suggested that I was dizzy, but I nevertheless continued my spiral of anxiety related to health, which inevitably ends with the conviction that I am dying of a brain aneurysm.
Fortunately, I did not, at least this time. When I went to see my doctor, she diagnosed me with benign positional paroxysmal vertigo, or BPPV, a common form of vertigo that may strike randomly. The problem arises in the inner ear, when calcium crystals are dislodged from an organ called utricle and end up in one of the semicircular atrial canals. Imagine a ball in a hoop; Suddenly, a mass of particles roll and send mixed signals to the brain about the position of the body. The resulting vertigo can last from minutes to years. Years!
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Fearing that this earthquake would be my new normal, I asked my doctor how to remove the discomfort. She sent me home with a simple directive: look for Dr. Carol Foster's "half-somersault maneuver" on YouTube.
Foster is an oto-rhino-laryngologist specializing in vertigo at the University of Colorado. One morning in 2006 or 2007, she woke up herself dizzy. She tried to do the Epley maneuver, which involves twisting the head and body to extract the calcium crystals from your ear canal and bring them back to their place. Only, it did not work: the crystals found themselves in another of its auricular canals.
"I started getting sick, it was horrible," said Foster when I contacted her for this story. "I could not move my head at all."
But she had to go to work. And she knew the inner ear as the back of her hand.
"I suddenly realized that I could do it by leaning forward," she said.
As the piece went around in circles, Foster developed a new set of movements to treat vertigo – ensuring the crystals would go where it was needed, and it was easier to do solo than the maneuver. Epley. The solution was to tilt the head back, then tuck it upside down, then turn it to the side, then lift it up.
"I did it, I came in, and it was fine! It was that. It was one of those fortuitous things."
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Foster then published didactic videos of the half-somersault maneuver on YouTube, where they were viewed millions of times. In 2019, Foster described his findings in a book titled Overcome positional vertigo.
For me, after five days of extreme vertigo, I studied a YouTube video of Foster's half-somersault maneuver. The video warned me that the movements would give me head spinning, but I still had to hold each of them until the full stop of the rotation and then move on to the next position. I did what I had said and after going through the motions several times, I did not feel dizzy at all.
I was healed.
You can watch the video I've used here:
For the good doctor, this breakthrough is an affirmation of his work. "It affects me a lot," Foster said of all the people she was able to help. "If you discover something that people can do for themselves and do it for free, is not it your moral obligation to provide it to everyone?"
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