If a watchmaker built a replica of Stonehenge out of tiny rocks and hairs, you’d have something close to the mechanism that helps us humans keep our balance. The stones sit delicately poised on top of the hairs, a nifty and improbable design.  

 

We have one inside each ear.

When they’re working properly, we stand upright and walk straight. When something’s out of whack, though, things get funky fast.

 

Yesterday morning, I couldn’t stand up in the shower.

Couldn’t, as in, couldn’t stop the ground from lurching or the ceiling from whooshing, or the walls from dancing when I turned my head. Couldn’t plant my feet and find my center.

 

Instinctively, I crouched, much the same way I did when I was in labor and transition hit me, years ago. There are some times nature just doesn’t want us to stand up.

 

At that point I realized I wasn’t going to make it to my ten o’clock interview.  

 

A pity, since as everybody looking for a job these days knows too well, those are hard to come by. This one was supposed to be the real thing, two people sitting down face-to-face, complete with facial expressions, body language, and my persistent fear that the guy interviewing me would be three inches shorter than I am.

 

In the technology fields of northern California, at least a thousand displaced workers apply for every posted job. After several weeks of angst and eyestrain, the hiring manager winnows that down to ten or twelve and starts making phone calls. 

 

I’ve had phone calls that ranged from twenty minutes to an hour and a half. Only once in the last six months did that move on to the next stage of courtship. Most people don’t call back, or you hear through the grapevine that the job was never filled, a sign that the posters just went fishing for free marketing advice.

 

Yesterday I had a live one, and I’m crouched in the shower stall thinking, Oh shi%t, am I having a stroke?

 

I had my husband call and tell the guy with the job that I lost a fight with some bad sushi. Then we went to the ER.

 

I can only imagine how much it cost to find out that I didn’t have a stroke, a heart attack, low blood pressure, a brain tumor, diabetes or multiple sclerosis. What I do have is Benign Positional Vertigo, most likely attributable to the sneezy kid who sat across the aisle on my flight to LA a few weeks ago and kept me persistently shrouded in a cloud of airborne virus, assuring that I came home with a killer headcold.

 

My little rocks have fallen off my little hairs.

 

Western medicine treats it as motion sickness, with an antihistamine that keeps you in balance but makes you sleepy as a housecat. I’m supposed to stop darting around like a hummingbird and practice moving slow. I’m supposed to drink lots of water and no booze. They didn’t think to tell me to avoid high places or the edges of things.

 

I left a message for the guy with the job when I got home. Sorry about the sushi, please let’s reschedule. So far, he hasn’t called me back.