Question of the Day: Umbrella Day

[the_siobhan]

I AM CAUGHT UP!![1]

4 – Ice cream For Breakfast Day: Have you ever eaten ice cream for breakfast (or for any other meal)?
5 – World Nutella Day: Do you like Nutella? How often to you eat Nutella?
6 – Chopsticks Day: Can you eat with chopsticks? If yes, how often do you use them?
7 – World Ballet Day: Have you ever been to a ballet performance? If not, is this something that might interest you? Have you ever had ballet lessons?
8 – World Opera Day: Are you an opera buff?
9 – Read in the Bathtub Day: Do you read in the bath? Have you ever been reading in the bath and dropped your book into the water?

I have eaten ice cream for dinner. More frequently I have eaten potato chips for dinner. Nutella is great on ice cream (with almonds!) but other than that I don't eat it much. I honestly don't have a huge sweet tooth, so anything sweet is a very occasional indulgence. I can eat with chopsticks and own a few sets. (I find the Japanese style easier than the Chinese.) I have been to a small number of ballets and enjoyed them. I took ballet as a child and was thoroughly traumatized by the experience. I have been to much larger number of operas and thoroughly enjoyed them. I have a friend who at one time was very much into opera and ended up taking a lot of his friends to (performances? recitals? Not sure of the correct noun here.) and I was the lucky beneficiary on a number of occasions. Thanks to him I got to see the entire Ring Cycle and some modern composers who were fantastic. I may have read in a bathtub once or twice as an experiment but never really got the appeal. This might be partially because I am long and don't really fit in bathtubs very well.

10 – Umbrella Day: Umbrella or raincoat? Do you carry an umbrella or raincoat “just in case” if the weather looks doubtful, or do you take your chances? What types of umbrellas do you like? Do you keep umbrellas in different places, e.g. one at work, one in your car (if you have a car), to avoid being caught by unexpected rain?

So here's the thing.

I have a vestibular disorder, which means my balance is crap. Most people can kinda grasp what that means intellectually. Walking on ice is harder. Parkour is right out. Probably not doing any... gymnastics? Tightrope walking? But that's really it.

In real life it is way more than that. Vestibular is associated with hearing so loud noise make me dizzy. (concerts) Vision is part of how we orient ourselves in our environment, so lots of movement in my visual field makes me dizzy. (crowds) Ditto flashing or moving lights make me dizzy (that fucking Scotiabank movie theatre downtown, which is also LOUD and CROWDED). I can't chew gum and walk at the same time, I shit you not, something about moving my jaw like that confuses my sense of where my head is located in 3D space. (Talking and walking I can do, (I guess because it's less mechanical? No idea.) I went to some spiffy catered work event a few years ago and I couldn't have any of the free coffee or breakfast because there was no place to sit down. And the food looked really good too!) When it first happened stairs were hard because I could no longer trust my body sense of where my feet were but also looking down made me dizzy.

So anyway, lots of physio and it's mostly under control now yadda yadda, BUT, gravity storms are still an occasional thing. So it is always a thing where I don't like to carry stuff in my hands. (I have never carried a purse, I think purses are devices for ensuring that you lose all your possessions all at once) but also now I actually can't carry something that means my weight is not centred. And I really really need to have my hands free because I just might need to flail around like an idiot to figure out which way is up and where I am in three dimensional space, and I would rather not do that with a pointy object in my hand. This goes triple if I'm on a bus, because the way they move makes it just that more likely that I need to hold on.

So that is a long multi-paragraph way of saying "No I do not carry an umbrella."

Often, I will wear a hat.

**

Today I have spam with the title "How to control your penis' mind..." and I keep looking at it and thinking um...

Also I have been getting SO MUCH spam for something that will make me pee more prodigiously. Is that really a thing? I can see it being useful if I can just do it once and get it out of the way for the day, but other than that I don't see the appeal.

***

I spent some time with the Old Man today.

It was not good.[2]

I have spent the whole evening chewing the inside of my own head about this, and I think I need to talk to my sister about contingency plans. Because I may have legitimately hit the wall in terms of how much I can do for him.

***

[1] This will not last.
[2] Not getting into details because the man has the right to some privacy.

Comments

[dissectionist]

What vestibular thing do you deal with specifically (Meniere’s, vestibular neuritis, etc)? I ask because I have ongoing vestibular neuritis myself; the first four months were absolutely atrocious with nonstop spinning vertigo, but then we mostly got it under control with vestibular physiotherapy and horseback riding. (Horses move in three directions at once - alternating diagonal forward, up-down, slightly side-to-side - and the massive, strange vestibular input can be helpful for some neuritis sufferers by forcing their brains to adapt.)

It tends to flare any time I get a cold or something though, and that is a pretty regular occurrence with having two kids (aka pathogen vectors) in the house. :/ So although it’s mostly okay these days, I never know when it will go from annoying-but-okay to Five Alarm Bullshit. I don’t often find other people who deal with varying ongoing vertigo as well.

[the_siobhan]

I have nerve damage to the left otolithic organ. Apparently this is most frequently caused by infections or head trauma and I have had plenty of both, so who knows. Also, I assume that it's not a super common problem, given that I went for multiple balance tests that came back normal before an ENT requested the specific test that isolated the problem.

Honestly my biggest problem is that the nerve isn't 100% dead - certain things trigger it to start sending garbage information and that's when I fall down.

The riding sounds really interesting and I'm definitely keeping that on the backburner for whenever I'm in the position that 100% of my income isn't going into the house. In the meantime yoga really helps.

[dissectionist]

If you do look into riding, Toronto Equestrian Downtown (TED) is pretty close to you. I haven’t been to TED, but we were with TEN (TE North) for about eight months and both locations are owned and run by the same two women. From everything I saw, they care about their horses a lot, so I’d recommend them on that basis. My experience was that when one groom was stressing the horses, that groom got turfed quick. The owners didn’t hesitate to take horses out of lesson rotation if a horse was showing pain, and they brought in chiropractors for the horses with sore backs. When vet care was needed it was very quickly obtained, and the farrier was there twice a month to keep an eye on hooves. Stalls were kept clean and tack was maintained. While that experience was with their second location, I’d be very surprised if the care standards were any lower for the first location.

Is there any kind of treatment where they can just kind of… fry the nerve and take it out of commission?

[the_siobhan]

Is there any kind of treatment where they can just kind of… fry the nerve and take it out of commission?

You know that is something that had genuinely never occurred to me. I should ask.

[houseof9cats]

They can go into the inner ear, but there's a huge risk they'll take out something else important by accident and make you deaf, so they don't go in there unless it's truly unmanageable.

So they told me.

(Similar problem here.)

Also super interesting about riding. I'm a former equestrian and we're still trying to figure out if this is post concussion syndrome with cervical involvement from ten years of falls, so I'm specifically *not* riding. Makes sense, though, the movement. Best therapy so far has been vestibular rehab, which is similar. They put Sidney Crosby in some kind of orbital machine, but us plebes don't get that kind of star treatment.

[elusis]

I half-envy you having an actual diagnosis. As you may or may not know (Bob), in 2010 I went through a period of attacks of DFO (Done Fell Over) that increased in severity and frequency until I started winding up in the ER almost weekly with incapacitating nausea and dizziness. Fast forward through loads of imaging and testing and half a day spent at the world's worst Disneyland (the ENT balance testing lab), and the results were more or less a combination of finger-pointing and ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ .

The Thing proved somewhat amenable to diuretics, but my kidneys promptly went on strike and started throwing rocks at my ureters. So my neurologist tried a low dose of Effexor (venlafaxine), which appeared to stop the thing more or less in its tracks. (Fun fact: Effexor withdrawal produces a variety of symptoms within 18-24 hours after a missed dose, including... nausea and dizziness...)

Anyway, I'm interested that they found a specific cause for you, even though it sure as hell sucks (loud noise? in what universe is that fucking fair to an old punk??)

It's really hard for my partner to understand how something like "talking to me in low tones while standing in the wrong place in the room for my hearing aid to pick up" or "sitting at the wrong angle to a wall in a restaurant with super-bouncy acoustics" can make me almost uncontrollably grumpy and fragile because of the effect it has on my cognitive load and subjective balance, covered with that faint frisson of nausea. Stupid fucking ear design, Eddie Izzard really called it on that one.