Before I dabbled in it myself, I didn’t think it was a medical condition any more than I thought the willies were a medical condition. My sole association was the Hitchcock film. If you’ve seen Vertigo, you’ll know this is a movie that not only has little to do with the condition, but stretches the limits of believability in general: A stunning twenty-five-year-old woman throws herself at an unemployed fifty-year-old man and San Francisco is entirely devoid of traffic. These are but two of the many reasons they don’t show Vertigo in medical school. The trailer for the film, on the other hand, rings as true as tinnitus. A prop dictionary is flipped open and the camera zooms in on the entry for vertigo: “A state in which all things seem to be engulfed in a whirlpool of terror.”
* * *
On the train back to New York, I watched telephone wires bob and smokestacks billow as I focused on Long Island Sound. Once my body discovers it can do something—get a weird rash, have a sinus infection, eat an entire block of cheese in one sitting—it’s liable to do that thing again. What I did not want was to become dizzy on a fast-moving object. I imagined it would be like when a moving subway car passes your still one and you experience the somewhat embarrassing sensation of momentum. Are we mov—? Oh. Never mind.
As soon as I got home, I made an appointment with an ear, nose, and throat doctor whose last name is Goldfinger. I had seen Dr. Goldfinger in the past and knew him to be one of those rare doctors who maintained a balance1 between treating you like a person and treating you like The New England Journal of Medicine. I also knew him to have a humongous painting of a Rorschach test in his waiting room. Please allow me to correct the image in your mind: The words RORSCHACH TEST are spelled out in giant letters.
Because it had been many years since my last visit, I was given a clipboard with a frosting-thick pile of forms to fill out. Bending my head invited the spins, so I slouched in my chair until my chin was parallel with my knees and leaned the clipboard against them. A woman seated across from me glared in my direction, but an old man in a tweed cap had a smile for me. Boy, had he been there before! I knew I should have been grateful for this twinkle of commiseration, for this moment of kindness passed from one generation to the next. But I don’t want to be part of any club that can’t remember its own handshake.
I clicked a cheap pink pen meant to resemble an esophagus and began filling in the blanks, of which there were many. Doctor’s office forms are a poor example of what we, as a society, are capable of. For starters, why are they on paper? Even the most avowed Luddite will concede that information like “Sulfur makes my throat close up” should not be subject to a mortal medium like handwriting. Also, why do they need your social security number fifty times? Are these forms being scattered to the four corners of the earth? Is one getting buried in a time capsule? Can I see the capsule? And “Who should we contact in case of emergency?” Well. I’m already at a doctor’s office.
* * *
Dr. Goldfinger hadn’t aged a day in the decade since last I’d seen him. This was not necessarily a good thing. True, he didn’t look a day over forty-eight, but he had also never looked a day under forty-eight. I’d seen photos. Either way, I was relieved to be in his presence. I knew he could help me because last time, he’d performed the Epley, a maneuver familiar to all vertigo sufferers. The Epley is often misspelled as “Epily,” the first half of the Latin word epilepsia. It should go without saying that vertigo is to epilepsy as the willies are to vertigo. But our brains are catastrophists, even when it comes to spelling.
The Epley is the only known way to alleviate BPPV (benign paroxysmal positional vertigo). Before the “benign” part erodes your sympathy, I might remind you that, technically, losing a pinkie is benign. The Epley was invented in 1980, a detail I find dubious in the same way I find the fresh ink in the Mormon Bible dubious. What did dizzy people do before 1980? Flounder around until they slammed into a flagpole? Also, maneuvers don’t feel very medical. For all its complexity, the human body is a finite terrain. There are only so many things one can do with one’s arms, for example. So if you’ve practiced yoga with any regularity, you have inadvertently Epleyed yourself.
What happens is this: You sit up straight and turn your head toward whichever ear is causing you trouble. A doctor then knocks you backward in the chair until you’re horizontal. If you have vertigo, you will experience the sensation of someone putting your brain in a washing machine and drying it out on a record player. Once this happens, the doctor turns your head in the opposite direction. Done quickly, this is called murder. Done slowly, it’s called medicine. It’s meant to dislodge sodium crystals from where
