Not Vertigo Now

By Frank P.

Throughout my life I have suffered from a fear of heights under certain circumstances and have hitherto thought that the correct label for the condition was ‘vertigo’. One of the worst effects of it has been that, whenever I find myself in circumstances that trigger it, my testicles quickly return to where they were sited before they dropped at the early age of  … well … take you pick – (and only those of the male gender; mothers with sons; dick doctors and probably vets will have practical experience in this regard, I guess):

http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090616102809AANHOMI

Anyway, mine have been down for as long as I can remember, except when I am foolish enough to put myself in situations that trigger what I thought was ‘vertigo’, when said ovoids return to where they had nestled before ‘the dropping’ – whenever that was and whatever it means physiologically.

These occasions have included standing too close to high cliffs, such as Beachy Head; driving through high mountain passes, such as the Tyrol in Austria; the Haute Alpes; or The Corniche along the Cote d’Azur (or being present when any of my numerous issue or theirs (and so on ad infinitum – or at least until I meet my own infinitum in the not too distant future) find themselves in similar circumstances.

This irrational fear rather foolishly prevented me from boarding any aircraft that was likely to take off until I was well into my thirties, when I was peremptorily ‘volunteered’ to become a Helicopter Observer during the first Police Helicopter experimental flights in the very early 1970s, Then with some trepidation and not wishing to appear wimpish, I took to the air with some fairly cavalier pilots (ex-RAF and Fleet-Air-Arm) from Air Gregory at Denham:  thereby hangs a tail that will have to wait for another time … as I digress.

The reason I mention it at all, is that, strangely, my ‘vertigo’ didn’t kick in then. So thereafter I took to the air with gay abandon (when gay still meant light in the heart, rather than light in the loafers), eventually using many modes of air transport, flitting across the Atlantic as necessary and feeling a strange peace, rather than an irrational fear, as glimpses of the planet 35,000 feet below, through the fleecy clouds, even moved me to scribble ditties on the back of my PanAm or Virgin or BA tickets as I gazed downwards’. For example:

Race Against Time

Suspended and enthralled above the panoramic ocean
Watching snowy cumulus drift o’er the rippling sea.
The sun rose in the West, as Concorde’s supersonic motion
Left the sun still slowly setting in the Isle of Innisfree
As my thoughts turned to my loved ones, east of me.

Arriving in New York before departure time in London;
Defying Natures rule, across the wide Atlantic Sea;
Taking lunch in an hotel room on the West Side of Manhattan
As the sun crossed the horizon on the Isle of Innisfree.
And my thoughts turned to my loved ones east of me.

Hardly eloquent Wordsworthian descriptions, but certainly not the words of someone gripped in the fear of heights, either – and anyway, Wordsworth never took to the air, so odious comparisons are uncalled for.

And once, while in New York, I shared the late evening with my wife and a few other friends astride the World Trade Centre after dark – and after closing time for the general public – a privilege granted by Fred Morrone the Police Chief of the Port Authority, with whom I had liaised when he was a Sergeant in the NJ State Police some years earlier. This was of course before the Muslim maniacs decided that, although they would like ‘wipe Israel off the map’,  it might be easier to do a test run one of the icons of ‘The Great Satan’, viz. the WTC – and wipe it off the map for starters. Of course, they succeeded and sadly wiped out my old friend in the process. He rushed over from his office just over the Hudson to assist in the rescue attempts and was one of those that perished when the first building collapsed. Bastard barbarians! But again, I digress …

The point is that on that wondrous evening I felt not even a twitch in the testicular region (except of course the anticipation of what might prevail after a very pleasant evening on my wife’s first trip to New York) and assumed that my ‘vertigo’ had been cured by adventures various.

However, some time afterwards, I visited the Grand Canyon and the Boulder Dam and once again the symptoms of ‘vertigo’ re-appeared, somewhat inconsistently, admittedly … but return they did!

But none of this prompted this little essay, which so far has merely been a prologue to my reason for taking to the keyboard in confession. I have discovered that what I have been suffering from over the years, inconsistently or otherwise, is not ‘vertigo’ at all.

Vertigo is a term for clinical symptoms, which I discovered a couple of weeks back when after one of my nocturnal and sleep interrupting visits to the loo, constantly caused by BHP (aka ‘old man’s prostatitis’ etc.)  – one of the many punishments of the seven blind bastards of fickle fate that I am currently undergoing for having the effrontery to exist beyond the biblical allotment of three score and ten).

As I got back into bed I thought it had fallen through the floor and entered the final vortex on the journey to the abyss; the sensation of falling and nausea was horrifying. When I regained ‘consciousness’ the whole room continued to spin around as though it had become a carousel. When I put my feet back on the floor, it became a cake walk; the desire to vomit became overwhelming and I continued to ‘heave’ for some time before the sensation subsided though I couldn’t vomit as there was little or nothing in my stomach.

I thought that perhaps the cocktail of prescribed junk various for the medley of maladies discovered by my GP, Haematologist and Pee-Quack, had finally begun to addle my already demented brain, but as the symptoms subsided I decided to ignore the problem. The next night a similar state of affairs returned and this time my wife called the ambulance as she feared I might be expiring, as my tinnitus had reached jet-plane decibels and I was the colour of Dracula on full-moon night.

When the paramedics arrived they wired me up and though they couldn’t stop the room from spinning, they decided that I was not suffering a heart attack as she feared; after consultation by phone with the locum GP, decided it was ‘vertigo’, which indeed is a clinical term for symptoms that arise in various illnesses, such as a brain tumour, inner ear infection, Menieres Disease and other such infections of the central nervous system and that I should take Stemetil to counteract the effects.

I won’t go into the medical internecine war that ensued as the various consultants have disagreed about what the cause is of my symptoms, anybody who knows the NHS as I do gets used to such polemical discourse; but one thing they can all agree about is that symptoms = vertigo! And when they look at their computers (they never look one in the eye, do they?) and notice what D of B appears on their screen their facial muscles scream a simple message:

“WTF are you whingeing on about you old coffin dodger; its time you declared, we lost the Test yesterday.”

Now, to add insult to injury, I’m reliably informed by Gerard Vanderleun that what I have hitherto been experiencing throughout my whole life is not vertigo at all – but in fact acrophobia!

See: http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/mondo_bizarro/climbing_shanghai_tower.php

I rather foolishly (under my current circumstances) clicked on the video link. Whoops – there go my nuts again!

Thank you Gerard. I’ll let you know if they manage to sort out which of the junk is causing the vertigo. But your clip sure brought on the old acrophobia. I always thought that was what hermits suffered from. Now my dictionary tells me that’s agoraphobia.  Hey ho!