When The World Gets Vertigo
Friday afternoon, my sister called me saying our mother was on her way to the hospital. She was feeling sick, with nausea and dizziness. After an initial check at the local medical center, she was rushed to the hospital by ambulance to keep her safe on the way. It took a few minutes for me to let my son know and for him to tell his sisters, and after less than an hour we were all together at the hospital, trying to get my mom through unbelievable bureaucracy of more and more tests, including some tests she had just went through at the medical center, with no clear answer from any of the doctors...
After the blood test, head CT, one more EKG and more, they said she may be experiencing symptoms of vertigo . The doctor tried a procedure which was supposed to ease these symptoms without much success and eventually they agreed to send her home, hoping it will get better over time...
During these hours at the hospital, we heard the pain filled shouts of a family that had lost a family member that night. From what some of us could hear (and it was quite amazing that one can hear this horrible news being told to someone else in the hospital corridor without any privacy in such a difficult situation), he was a relatively young man who went to the medical center saying he wasn’t feeling well. He was sent home with no diagnosis and later experienced fatal cardiac arrest :-(
Just after we witnessed the notice to his family, I was sitting by my mother’s bed, hearing one of the ER staff members saying to a different patient “OK, so I’m taking you to the operation room now” and the patient shouting back “ Operation? What operation?” then, the staff member paused for a second and replied back “Oops sorry, I got the wrong bed” …Were we in a nightmare or was everything real here? ….
It was all one big mess; wounded people being carried from ambulances and by family members that were arriving every few minutes, tired doctors and nurses that were trying to cope with everything and in between all of this -us, ordering our Friday meal by WOLT (yes, despite everything that had occurred, some of us hadn’t eaten for a whole day and became hungry in the middle of all of the mess...).
If our parents would have invited us all for dinner that evening, some of us would probably not have shown up as a result of all kinds of other constrains, but this dinner brought us all together in a very strange way...
I’m writing this while my mother is recovering back at home and all looks brighter already thank god.??
However, it led me to think that often times these are the kind of symptoms that the whole world is suffering from; Sometimes, it just feels like everything is going in circles too fast; pandemics, security threats and even stock exchange graphs that seem to some like war zones…and all we want is for this to stop and for us to be able to step away from the carousel which makes our head spin and our heart beat a bit too fast...
Those crystals in our ears that usually keep us stable are misplaced, and no one can explain exactly what happened or how to get them back in place. There are some common practices and some tips and tricks but mainly, it’s just a matter of time and slowing down...
Reading through Dr. Google, I learned that 20-40% of people will experience a sense of vertigo at some point in their life, so we’d better be prepared to deal with that!
So, what can we do? How can we help the world slow down and get back to its normal pace?
I’m not an expert, and definitely don’t know how to heal the world, but I strongly believe that just like our family, the world too requires first and foremost love and care, some empathy, reaching out to each other and small actions that each and every one of us can do to make this world a better place, or as the song I love the most states in Hebrew “You and I will change the world” and in English "Waiting for a better day".
Wishing you all a vertigo-less new week, full of positive energies, health and happiness!