Recently I have been suffering from a world out of balance.

Literally, I feel as if I had just stepped off a week-long cruise and the world is rocking under my feet. I’m not dizzy or light-headed, just unbalanced, reeling from the living room chaise to the kitchen to the bathroom to my desk chair to bed.

I worried what might be causing it and Dr Google said it could be a symptom of high blood pressure. So I took my blood pressure and it was high. After a week of unbalance, I called Telehealth, which I have had pretty good results with prior to this, and spoke a completely useless doctor who wanted me to go to an NYC Emergency Room and get a catscan – in the middle of Covid? No thank you. So instead I made an appointment with a cardiologist, who turned out to be very nice, but who immediately prescribed a drug that brought my top number down but not my bottom number. I’m seeing her again this week for more tests.

But my world is still out of balance.

I suspect it has to do with my inner ear. I’ve had sinus problems for a while. If I don’t use Nasacourt every day, my sinuses rebel. So I went back to Dr Google and discovered that these crystals in your ears that help with hearing can get displaced (ok this sounds wacky but I’m probably not explaining it right) and cause you to feel dizzy. There’s a way to try to rock them back into place, which involves resting your head in a pattern of angles – it takes about 2 minutes. Ok, I say, looking at the diagrams, what can it hurt? So I did it.

And now I’m more out of balance than before. In fact, nauseatingly so. The articles I read seemed to indicate that you need to do it 3 times a day for several days to make things better. But they don’t say anything about it making things worse.

So now, in addition to seeing the cardiologist, I feel like I need to see my ENT. The cardiologist is less than a quarter mile away. The ENT is about a mile away and my foot, which I injured in February and never got treated before the big At Home, hurts when I walk even the quarter mile. So now I need to see the Podiatrist, too. And I should do all this now, this week, because Labor Day is coming and many of the people who retreated from New York plan to return just after Labor Day. So the cases will go up again. The people I know who have stayed – who didn’t use C19 as an excuse to retreat to the country for the summer – are all making appointments this week with various doctors and even dentists, determined to get a full tune-up now before the returning hoards cause the next wave, and we all have to stay home again.

So I suspect I will be lurching and limping to see my doctors this week, maybe I can squeeze them both in on my summer Friday, although I suspect they take summer Fridays, too. A doctor in August? Why wouldn’t they?

What a crazy world we’re living in.

A world out of balance.