Vertigo! in The View from the Terrace

I saw the doctor last week about the dizziness and she said I have something called Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo. It’s caused by small calcium crystals in the inner ear moving to the wrong place and is fairly common in older people. She gave me some information, including the name of some exercises to do, and told me to look them up on the internet at home. I have done them religiously every day for 9 days and am no better. She said if there was no improvement I could see their physiotherapist to check I was doing the exercises correctly. No doubt he will have a waiting list. In the old days she would have gone through it there and then with me, but nowadays doctors are on such a tight schedule they always refer you on. Even if you need a blood test they tell you to make an appointment with the nurse. When I was expecting my babies the doctor used to take the blood at my check up appointment. It seems that their time is too valuable now. Tony gets angry about this as he needs regular blood tests and if he needs to see the doctor too it means taking time off work twice and then his boss isn’t happy and he loses money. It seems that our time is not deemed important. so I have to suffer from my vertigo for a week or two when it might well have been fixable at the original appointment.

I am still sometimes getting other symptoms too. One is the feeling of not being able to get enough breath, it is only now and then and I think it may be some sort of nasal congestion because I can usually breath through my mouth OK, but it’s worrying not to know the cause. I also get a feeling of pressure in my neck sometimes and occasionally feel a bit feverish. I did tell the doctor about all of that but she seemed just to concentrate on the giddiness. They only seem willing to deal with one or at the most two things at a time. To be fair she did check my heart and lungs last year when I had similar symptoms and couldn’t find anything wrong. I will mention it all again when I go back. It’s worrying, though, because I have arranged to meet an old school friend on Friday and I don’t know whether to postpone it or wait and see how I feel on the day.

The weather has cooled down considerably. Sunday it was pouring with rain, but that is to be expected as it was a bank holiday weekend! Tony went camping in Pembrokeshire so won’t be very happy, but Saturday was bright and sunny and Monday it was dry if overcast. At least I don’t need to water the plants.

On Saturday I wanted to go out somewhere as, apart from the doctor’s I haven’t been out for 2 weeks. I missed both folk clubs last week. On the Sunday I was just feeling generally unwell and on Tuesday I had a migraine. We had planned to go to a local safari park this month. Hubby loves that sort of thing. He says he was never taken to a zoo as a child. But it is almost a hundred mile round trip and I couldn’t be sure I could help with the driving because of the vertigo even if I was feeling well. He still wanted to go but I know how driving makes him tired so I persuaded him to leave it to anothet time. In the end we went to Goodrich Castle which is only about 18 miles away. We had a lovely afternoon. The castle is set in beautiful countryside overlooking the River Wye and we climbed up to the top to see the view which was great but it sent my vertigo crazy. I can see now why people think vertigo it is a fear of heights. Looking down made everything start to spin just like in that Hitchcock film. Hubby kept saying I really must come and see this view and I told him firmly it looked just as good from a few feet back!

This photo was actually taken through the window over the latrines! Those property programmes on TV would call it a lovely view from the loo, I wonder if people in those days appreciated that sort of thing.

I tried to crop this photo in order to bring me closer but image shack doesn’t seem to be working properly. I told Hubby he needed to be closer but he insisted it was fine. He told me later he wanted to get all of the castle in.

This is him having a rest while I take photos.

The cannon in this photo is Roaring Meg and is responsible for a lot of the damage done to the castle in the Civil War.

The last time we went to Goodrich was when the children were small and the time before that was on our honeymoon. We honeymooned in the Wye Valley, fell in love with the area and ended up moving here. We have never regretted that decision.