Long Suffering Spouse fails to attain verticality

I jinxed us.

In our last episode I suggested that Long Suffering Spouse would defy any virus that tried to lay her low; I said she'd consider herself healthy enough just as long as she could attain verticality. As long as she could get up and go.

Friday morning, Long Suffering Spouse's get up and go got up and went. She failed to attain verticality.

Almost from the moment I posted last week, my health deteriorated. My Fitbit told the tale: Instead of my now-customary 10,000+ steps, on Tuesday, I achieved fewer than 2400. On Wednesday, determined to get ahead of my personal creeping crud (nothing more exotic than a bad cold), I tried to sleep the day away and managed not even a thousand steps.

My wife suggested I was roughly a week behind her, health-wise, and she carried on as usual. She worked until midnight Tuesday. And Wednesday. And Thursday, too.

Friday morning, while I was laying awake and trying to concentrate more on the radio news and less on my hopelessly clogged sinuses, Long Suffering Spouse started to scream.

When she tried to sit up, the room started spinning, she started feeling sick, and garish, pulsating visions started to impose themselves upon her field of vision. Then she thought everthing had or would go black... and that wouldhave been a relief.

The above illustration is garish and nausea-provoking, perhaps, but it isn't close to what Long Suffering Spouse experienced by way of her vertigo attack Friday morning: We made the diagnosis fairly quickly, after consulting the greatest medical mind the profession has ever known... Dr. Google.

It took a couple of hours for Long Suffering Spouse to make it out of bed, and another hour besides before we could get downstairs to our coffee. I had texted my wife's principal immediately after the first round of scrreaming stopped, letting her know that Long Suffering Spouse would not make it in. I was then free to try and find some place where she might be seen.

The trick to accessing quality medical care in America these days is to never try. There'd be no point in even trying our internist; she doesn't see sick people. Actually, that's probably unfair to suggest: She may well see sick people... if they've gotten, or remained, sick whilst waiting for their appointments. We'd made it downstairs; we were no longer in a true emergency sistuation. We'd not have to bother an ambulance. But, even though Dr. Google had made it quite clear that the vertigo attempt was alsmost certainly just a temporary, if miserable, condition, my wife wanted to be seen by someone. And my daughters agreed.

I therefore found an immedate care (a 'doc-in-the-box') nearby and having ability to see us... allegedly... pretty quickly.

I made an appointment online... and we were still there for more than two hours. For most of this time I waited in the car (we had plenty of our own germs, thank you, we didn't need to mix and mingle with any new ones unnecessarily), while Long Suffering Spouse languished in an exam room. At one point, Long Suffering Spouse texted me that she was beginning to think that they'd forgotten her.

This proved to be only partially true: A nurse practitioner did indeed find Long Suffering Spouse and administer various tests -- ruling out ear infection and stroke and that sort of thing -- and then triggered another blinding episode of vertigo by having my wife lean back in a certain way. Apparently the exercise was designed to set off an attack, but the suddenness and intensity of the attack was such that it seemed to have scared the NP as well as my wife. Anyway, they decided I'd best come into the examination room, and I immediately answered the summons that came in via text.

I gave the receptionist my wife's name and asked how may I get to her room -- and she first told me that they didn't have anyone by that name -- then she asked me if I maybe had intended to wander into the physical therapy place next door instead -- and only then, when I persisted, scrolled back far enough on her screen to find out where Long Suffering Spouse was. So I guess they were in the process of forgetting she was there.

Anyway, long story short, Long Suffering Spouse is much better today -- having attained verticality again, if unsteadily -- she's back at school, teaching.

You, the reader, may take today's essay as testimony to my wife's grit and determination. Her toughness. And, of course, that is a reasonable and correct interpretation of this tale.

But I see something else that may be going on here, something having to do with some hietherto unsuspected predictive power that this site may possess: I had only to comment about my wife's insistence on going to work as long as she could 'attain verticality' and -- voila! -- not only is she not able to go to work, but she is in fact kept out of work by a malady that makes 'attaining verticality' a near-impossibility.

Well, then. This may be an opportune moment to say I am going out to buy winning Lotto tickets. Which, now that I think about it, is exactly what I want to do next. If there's anything to it, my next entry may be datelined from the South of France....