The first time it happened—late in the evening, in the living room—I yelled. The second time, too. I couldn’t just sit up from lying on the sofa (or was it the other way around?) without my brain suddenly spinning inside my skull, circling violently. But almost right away, it righted. The loopiness cleared.

Then I figured out I didn’t have to yell. It didn’t hurt. It was just weird and awful.

The next couple of days, I knew not to lie down or tilt my head too far. If I went dizzy erasing the whiteboard after class, from overreaching, I could drop into a chair until I steadied. If the room momentarily veered when I perambulated past my students at their desks, I could flail my arm around, try to stabilize.

In case my brain was bleeding out from the head bang two weeks previous, we decided to take me to the ER.

Now that was a trip. Because I said vertigo, when I checked in, because I said maybe a concussion, they told me to seat myself in the fast-track waiting area. Soon I got pointed to a different seat, by the desk of a triage nurse. Blood-pressure cuff on my arm, I peered at the numbers lighting up the nurse’s screen positioned high on a pole, like a traffic signal. My husband peered.

Back in our seats, we again waited. “One ninety-two,” I murmured, marveling. “Two twelve,” my husband murmured, correcting me. “Crazy,” he murmured.

I still don’t know what that 192 was about.

Also, I figure anybody’s blood pressure would skyrocket in an ER.

Shortly, we were in a little room off to the side and they were pasting stickers on me, EKG stickers, black. No, I was saying, no no, my heart’s okay, I’m fine. But this is the drill, they were saying, this is the protocol, and somebody was screaming over the intercom CODE RED, CODE RED, ENDOSCOPY AND OUTPATIENT DEPARTMENT, over and over. They they were done with their machine, unhooking my wires.

The big waiting area next, where nobody was dying, just wheelchairs and phlegmy coughing and frowzy idlers like us. After not too long, the wide doors spreading and letting us through. A gurney to climb onto. Somebody writing on the sheet with black marker, near my foot. The doctor stop-in. The CT person gliding me like on ice, down a hall, never once bumping into a doorway or even grazing it (though when she had me move to the scanner bed, and then out of it, my brain did its dreadful spins). The pee sample. And finally sandwiches, because nothing was wrong with me and we were ravenous. Me still propped on the gurney like a patient, bedfast, my husband went and stood in the doorway in hopes somebody might think about letting us go.

Now that I’m not having a brain hemorrhage, a few key points:

1) You really can get sandwiches. I’d learned this from watching the ER show The Pitt. You can just ask.

Ours, the turkey could’ve been on those soft plump hamburger buns from Walmart instead of ordinary sliced wheat. If Sentara wants to know.

2) That gurney word, ug. Reminds me of that awful Guernica painting by Picasso, or Guernsey cows with their baggy brown udders.

3) Avoid the one bathroom. Just my advice.

The bathroom closest to my room was occupied. I should’ve waited. Instead I ventured further with my pee container, down a different corridor.

“Very strange in there,” I told Beth, the nurse charting me, when she came back to my room from somewhere else. I’d found no paper towels. No hand soap. The place had a gray-metal toilet seat. A slender ledge of sorts, blunt edged, where the user might put their tightly balled little piece of Kleenex or whatever. Inexplicable.

“Oh,” she said, “that bathroom is for the psychiatric patients. Right next is the psychiatric wing.” I could wash my hands at the sink next to my bed, she said.

I’d already done that.

If a cop or ambulance crew put me in that bathroom I’d want to hurt myself.

4) A lot of people’s brains bleed and why other people’s don’t has nothing to do with God looking out for them especially.

5) A lot of people get dizzy. If it’s an inner-ear issue, a person can maybe budge back into place the shifting crystals. The person has to hang their head a certain way. There’s an Epley maneuver. There are Brandt-Daroff exercises. Our own doctor in Pittsburgh, the other morning after learning I was stuck on the sofa (he could see me on his phone screen), sent me an AI evaluation documenting these. Also recommended: extra pillows at night.

6) If I sound cavalier about disaster and death, I’m not. But a person is better off talking about their coming ruin than pretending they’re invincible.

A week or so ago, my husband driving an icy highway in PA in the dark, me in the passenger seat, lots of oncoming headlights and disappearing red taillights, I took a swig from my prize extra-tall narrow-necked water bottle. This one, you have to unscrew the lid and drink directly from the sharp stainless-steel opening, and I said to my husband, “If we’d have a collision, this thing could clip off the bottom of my nose and go straight through to the back of my brain.”

“Well,” he said, “then it would be a painless death.”

And then last night, right before bed, I was eating this wonderful leftover soup from a jar I’d microwaved to fiery hot. Saucy and cheesy, it had soft-cooked bits of broccoli and carrots and onion, but I felt like I was crunching down on glass. Or else losing a filling, except I wasn’t. Why was there glass in my soup? The jar looked fine. I ate some more. Then my husband wanted some. He crunched down, too.

We stared at the jar, cheese coated, after he emptied it. I scoured it with soap and hot water. Still no signs of chipping or cracking. But who knows. Do we have glass, now, in our intestines? If the ways to die are this freaky and myriad a person may as well face them squarely.

 

Brooklyn street, pre dizzy era, 2025