Sylvia's Journal

I had until yesterday always associated Vertigo with Hitchcock but from now on it will be associated with my four day trip to deliver a presentation at a conference in Washington that nearly didn’t happen and 5 hours in the emergency room of George Washington University Hospital.

The vertigo had started small, brief episodes before I got off the plane on Saturday morning, a few more that day, a few more on Sunday, all short and fleeting. But then, at the end of the morning session of the big conference that celebrated the end of the project I have been working on for all these years, the episode did not stop. I became like a drunk: unable to walk with the room spinning around me and then my stomach started to heave. Two colleagues got me to the bathroom, just in time; after that I had to have a plastic bag/waste basket next to me at all time.

For a while it was touch-and-go: will she present, will she not. My colleagues were ready to whisk me away to the emergency room but I resisted. After all I had travelled 36 hours to make that presentation. In the end the presentation became a team effort: the Afghan representative of the ministry of health and one of my Boston based colleagues prepared themselves for taking over. We ended up each doing a piece. We took longer than planned, there were fewer people than we had expected and there were essentially no questions but we delivered the message that some good stuff is happening in Afghanistan.

And then I was taken to the hospital where I had a cat scan (everything OK), blood tests (everything OK), and EKG (OK) and the final conclusion, luckily, of benign locational vertigo. A little after 10 PM I was sent home with antivertigo medicine and the OK from the doctor to board the plane to Dubai tonight. My colleagues wanted to keep me in DC, in a Holiday Inn near the office but that was not at all in my plans. I am happy to go home; a home that I learned just now had been bombed again and had a plane crash. Vertigo seems like a minor irritation in comparison.