When the Room Started Spinning

A dizzy spell humbled me. It also taught me how little control we have.

By Michael Hunter, MD

A quiet room.

A spinning world.

When balance breaks, reality bends.

Opening Scene: Borges, Breakfast, and a Tilting World

At first, I thought the floor had become liquid.

My bed stretched to the right like a Salvador Dalí painting — dripping into the wall, reality folding like soft canvas.

I blinked.

No luck.

Still tilting.

Had I walked into a Murakami novel by mistake?

Maybe I was late for my meeting with Kafka’s beetle.

It was just past sunrise.

The coffee had barely cooled.

And yet, I was adrift — not in thought, but in gravity.

The diagnosis?

Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo.

A fancy way of saying: turn your head slightly, and the world forgets how to stay put.

It’s caused by crystals in your inner ear that shift out of place — tiny biological marbles rolling where they shouldn’t.