Exploring western empirical medicine analysis

Feeling as if floating or spinning. Partial symptom matches and nothing to lose.

Head and heart

The 90 minutes drive (taxi, they’ve told me I cannot drive) from house to the main town on this island, followed by the little plane is like my body is moving behind me. I’m in a centrifugal rollercoaster, inside blood cells moving with gravity, body surging in front feeling. Except reverse and go sideways and shake back and forwards too for what my body and cells and I feel. I never liked those rides! Backwards or forwards… Having these sensations, close to 24/7 at varying degrees, sometimes totally all I can manage, ain’t much good. 

I’m laughing at the ridiculousness of it all. In the hotel in the city, after an hour’s ride on a little plane, it is like a post apocalypse zombie movie. Empty. Nothing. Everything shut up. As are the airports. Thank goodness I’d thought ahead, at least a little bit, and grabbed a gin and tonic can, there was no food, at the gas station on the way to the airport. The alcohol dulls the rush feeling and means I can walk out to the convenience store for lunch (pre-made sandwiches at 9 pm 🙂

Head

The raging strength of this, as the bed spins around me in the city hotel, has me searching further. It is super hard to read so I’ve been reluctant to do much journal research but I push myself in desperation. The closest I find, for a diagnosis that fits my symptoms—70% of them—is “Feeling as if floating or spinning” That’s a Cedars Sinai plain English site, here>. There’s another bit of that too, Olfactory Hallucinations without Clinical Motor Activity . The second one is a serious review, here>. I am not up to trying to make sense of it but this minimal research suggests I could  have seizures. Could that be a reason why I’m so short of breath, even with super mild exercise, sometimes? I can’t go any further with the research—reading is wildly harder than it used to be. 

However, this symptom fit is only because it is where I’ve been looking. There could be many other equally or more credible diagnoses, both my doctors are aware of that as well.

Nevertheless, this partial symptom match does give me a ‘no lose’ strategy. Keto diets can manage seizures in some people. I discover this goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks and Hippocrates (see NIH>) and so I start one. On the bed! Straight away.

In the spirit of this story, I’m so curious around our collective motivation. A partial symptom match is that inequity delivers poorer economic results—for example, see these OECD reviews on inequality and poverty here> That is a root cause of biodiversity destruction—increasing pressure to exploit more land—and consequently implicated in increasing the likelihood of further unique virus pandemics. 

Surely we should be wildly motivated to address it—better economic, social and health outcomes all together—as a no lose strategy.

Hara

For myself, I am super motivated. Keto means next to no carbs. Goodbye croissant—verboten. It does not matter that the research on this is encouraging but not conclusive (NIH here>) it’s more than enough to act.

However, action for me means very short stints and long pauses. As my friend David says, “When is it time to reef a sail at sea? When you first think about it!”. As I am writing this story, and 3 months in, I’ve got better about noticing those first thoughts. I stop, often for the day after 30 minutes, and live with that frustration. 

In reality it is not really a thought. Time to pause, time to reef a sail imperatives, comes straight from intuition. From our guts with experience and evidence informing our hara.

It is funny that. Intuitively we knew it was time to pause decades ago. It was time to reimagine how we could be in this world and be as part of it. In many creative places we did just this. We thought and created. We merged and weaved change and structures. And all the time the sticky modern-day thought patterns kept holding us back—this is how the world works and economic wealth alongside individual excellence and competition will answer everything. For example, see Attractors: strangely, we keep getting pulled in here>

Head

Fast forward to some results. A week after the Glasgow MRI the mercifully short report arrives. Once decoded—ischaemic foci, infracts and gyri anyone?—it indicates, contrary to previous tests, I may have had a thrombosis. 

It’s quite a thing to read something that says a small part of my brain has died. It’s obviously more personal than the many injustices going on around the world leading to death—either directly or as a result of ineptitude, power abuse and/or systems degradation. We don’t need to look very far to find these. From state sanctioned killing to racist policing, building collapse and fires to communities being pushed to the edge in extreme weather events related to our climate emergency.

That’s to say, it’s easy to make the links. It could be a mercifully short report too, just like my MRI one, on interconnected wellbeing and what we cognitively need to do to enable flourishing futures.

The thing is it’s never been just about evidence and logic. Sitting with my doctor, going through my report, it lands that this is somewhat more challenging than at first sight. The chain is now, possibly two weeks or so after the vax, when things were getting very wild, I had a blood clot, a CVST. This killed, due to low blood supply, a small part of my brain. That ‘stroke’ triggered or caused seizures. In my case the dissociative sort not the ones classically associated with fits and epilepsy.

At the moment, I put this chain as somewhere between speculation and informed guess. Scans lie. Scan 100 healthy people and you’ll find abnormalities like this in 5 to 10 of them.  Regardless, there are a lot of things that correlate between this, some of my symptoms and experiences plus in the incredibly limited amount of literature I can read.

I have to do the numbers 🙂 

• CVST the super rare brain thrombosis following this vax. About 1 in 100,000
• Dissociative seizures. About 2 in 100,000.
• Combined odds. 1 in 50 billion!

Surely it is time to buy a gambling ticket?
Win big, Part 3 Causal chains and silver linings here>