Woke up horribly hungover and kinda terrified...
 

Sat up and knew immediately something was really wrong....

That awful nausea.... the room tipping and spinning.....

What happened last night???

I got to my feet and I stumbled in the dark down the hall.... wobbling from side to side, feeling as though I was going to vomit.

WHAT THE HELL???? WHAT IS HAPPENING TO ME???

The last I remembered I'd been falling asleep beside my toddler waiting for my wife to come back to bed.

I turned on the lights, drank some water, tried not to vomit.... confused and afraid....

After about 15 minutes it passed and settled into a mild nausea and an occasional dizziness.

Went to the doctor at 11.

Turns out I have BPPV....

Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo

Very common... caused by the little crystals in your inner ear going wonky and the treatment is to do some weird exercises to set them right again.

But holy wow..... at almost 5 years sober that was really scary and the horrible feeling, the waves of nausea, the way the room tilted to and fro.....

It was one hell of a way to be reminded how grateful I am for sobriety.

:grouphug:

I think courage2 suffers from that!

I've had that happen too after starting a new med - I'm hope the Dr can help FreeOwl :)

D

wow, that must have been terrifying.

I am sure its going to be fine.

Dude, don’t do that. U r one of my heroes on this site. I was terrified u relapsed! Not funny!!

Ok, I was a little.

Sorry... wasn’t really meant as a joke.... it truly felt that way and was a super freaky experience. For the first several minutes I was truly panicked that I had relapsed and had blacked out - really scary.

Have it also , dizzy lying down and getting up . It’s annoying.

+1

Not sure what newbs are supposed to get from stuff like that other than, "Yeah, don't do that."

My Dad deals with that. He keeps a cane handy to help with his balance.

Fair perspective.

I was sharing an experience I had, and how I genuinely felt.

As for newbs - it’s my hope that what they’d see in my post is how utterly grateful I am for my sobriety, how my experience reminded me of that truly terrible experience of waking confusedly from a blackout and into a dizzying and disconnected nausea. How there are times even in long term sobriety that we are shocked into that state again and how sobriety is something we continue to work at and be grateful for even welll down the road. Perhaps they’d also see the goodness of remaining good humored and staying engaged with life in my words..... perhaps they’d only be frustrated at me and say ‘yeah don’t do that’. Whatever the case it’s my personality, my experience and my way of sharing something that happened to me.

Some years ago (I was in a long stretch of sobriety) I had to take a test to measure my lung capacity. I blew so hard into this tube-thingey that I passed out. Woke up on the floor, disoriented, and the first thing I thought was Holy Hell! What have I done now? Blacked out again? C'mon brain, think, where are we and what was the last thing I remember?

Such a relief when my senses came back. :)

Glad you're better Free Owl!

My father gets that occasionally. I know the first time it happened he had NO IDEA what was going on. Scary stuff. Glad you are ok. Get better!

The Epley maneuver. It works miracles. You can have someone help you with it at home. I suggest a physical therapist for your first time. You'll be right as rain if it is Vertigo.....can take about 24 hours.

Yup - doc assigned me the Eply and a few other corrective things - I’m already feeling better. Still a bit off but good to know it’s nothing serious.

And I’m sober lol

Wow that's some scary shxx

It's like one of those movies where the star wakes from a nightmare situation and unbeknown really has not woken up and the nightmare situation happens over.

Or it's nothing like that at all. Still some scary shxx.

Hope you are feeling somewhat better now that you know what the problem is!

Best wishes.

Nons, I had to laugh. You and I have had many talks about the insanity of our past lives. Waking up totally lost so many times that it becomes normal.

Right, I understand that. You did not wake up hungover, though. You may have "felt" like it, but you purposefully left that key word out of the subject title for dramatic effect. I get it - you are a creative writer/storyteller, so I understand your reasoning.

To clarify, by newbs, I mean people struggling to string together days, weeks, months, let alone years of sobriety, and not just newbie posters to the site.

I guess the best way I can describe it is I know someone with 15 years. I wouldn't want to wake up to a text that reads, "Woke up horribly hungover..." and a followup text that outlines a blackout morning and gradually reveals it was vertigo. At best, it would not be a funny joke, and at worst, it would be indirectly making light of the struggle we newbs have. Perhaps I'll feel differently if and when I ever have years of sobriety, I don't know.

I know neither of these are your intentions; I'm just clarifying my perspective, is all, and it's a fairly common joke on this board, so I'm not singling you out. You just did it better than anyone else, so I commented on it this time when someone else commented on it :)

Glad you are feeling better. Vertigo is nasty and scary.

well.... it got you to read the post anyway, so.....

:)

Alas - it's not the first time I've caught flak for the mechanism of a somewhat attention-getting title that leads to a different post revealing itself to not be what it sounded like.

Some like it, some hate it, some don't care.

I guess we all have our perspectives, eh?

:)

:grouphug:

Sure, but it just seems that specifically gotcha jokes about falling off the wagon in the newcomers to recovery section of a sobriety forum should be off-limits because some of us are struggling to stay clean.

Very scary! I'm glad you know how to treat it.