First off, thank you to my super cool fiancée Victoria for putting this image together.  I got bizarrely sick on Thursday and have been woozy since, so here’s a rundown of the story:

I was picking up Victoria from a work event in the city Thursday night and once I was about five minutes away from the pickup spot, I felt a feeling I had felt while driving once before roughly nine or ten years ago.  At the time, I suddenly felt like I was on a tilt-a-whirl and then seconds later felt like the entire world was spinning.  I was able to pull over to the side of the road and after about ten minutes I felt perfectly normal again and continued on my way.

While that occurrence was pretty long in the past and I had never really felt anything like it since, I instantly recognized the feeling and pulled to a stop.  Unfortunately I was in the middle of 34th Street by 12th Avenue, and the light in front of me was green.  By the time I had stopped, the entire world was spinning rapidly and I broke out into a cold sweat.  Hazard lights popped on, I waved to the cars behind me to pass.  Since it was pretty late at night (around 11pm) there weren’t a ton of cars which was lucky.  A couple minutes of heavy breathing and sweating later, I was able to turn off to the right and wait on the side of the road.

Much vomiting occurred.

Unpleasant.

Victoria met me on the side of the road and drove us back home.

The next morning I felt decent… but then after hours of work on a project releasing this week I felt the spins coming on again and even though I was just sitting at my desk I was suddenly super nauseous and the walls were swirling around me.

Now, this project is still releasing this week and I needed to get out an edit by the end of the day so I kept pressing forward, but I can’t overstate how difficult it is to animate maps for a documentary while the walls are warping.

I mostly took it easy this weekend, but checked in with my soon to be mother in law who is a retired doctor.  Apparently we have calcium crystals in our inner ears and they can float around into not-good-places which sends incorrect balance signals to our brains, which then makes everything spin.  There’s a series of head movements called the Epley Maneuver that she showed me so if symptoms come up again that’s something I should try.  As it turns out, my google-fu before asking her about it also led me to the Epley Maneuver, so I’d like to pat myself on the back a little for good google-fu.

That said, I’m still slightly dizzy and hoping the sensation goes away soon.

Do not like, zero out of ten, would not do again.

But hey, Victoria made a mockup of my tux for our wedding!