Dizziness, Diagnosis, and Dumb Google Holes

It’s funny — when you don’t have a serious illness, you can hop out of bed a little dizzy and think, “must’ve stood up too fast.”

If you’re me, and you do have cancer, your immediate response is: clearly the cancer has gone to my brain. Or — because I never miss a chance to overachieve — maybe it’s a brand-new cancer. Or possibly a brain-eating worm brought on by sneaking too many M&Ms.

Either way, it calls for hours of internet research to confirm my impending doom.

So this morning, that’s exactly how I woke up — dizzy, dramatic, and ready to self-diagnose. I opened my laptop to “write a blog” and two hours later, I was somewhere deep in the Google hole, no closer to a definitive answer but 100% sure I was dying.

Exhausted from all that medical detective work, I did what any rational adult would do: I pulled one of my mother’s old tricks and went back to bed.

And wouldn’t you know — when I woke up again, there on my nightstand were two medicine bottles, the same ones I’d taken before bed. I picked one up and read the fine print: “May cause drowsiness or dizziness.”

Well, damn. Turns out it wasn’t a brain-eating worm or a rare, one-in-a-billion cancer after all. It was the damn medicine.

Welcome to my every day. 💚