“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”—Sharon Begley.

On August 15, 2008, as I was sitting at my desk, I suddenly felt strange in the head. (Notice how I didn’t say it was a headache although you could if you were being very loose with the term.) It actually felt as if I donned a 5 pound (2.27 kilogram) weighted helmet, but not across my whole head. The sensation was specific to the occipital lobe. I felt the need to lie down, and I was too lightheaded to get up for several hours.

 

The next day, more strange symptoms began surfacing. If I watched motion, my eyes had trouble keeping up with the action. It was as if the motion were too fast, that my eyes were unable to take pictures of subsequent scenes quickly enough.

 

Another thing was that one eye, my left eye, felt as if it wasn’t looking at the same identical scene as my right eye, as if my left eye were slightly off. It’s not clear why I thought it was the left eye that was off, and the right eye was “correct”, but that’s what my brain was telling me. I tried experiments closing each eye and looking at horizontal lines to see where the disconnect was, but couldn’t discern anything in particular to explain the discrepancy. Could this have been some form of one eye oscillopsia?

 

Yet another strange symptom was that if moved too quickly, it felt as if my body wasn’t moving with me in sync. That is, my proprioception sense was about 500 milliseconds or so behind my actual body’s position. When I stopped moving, it quickly caught up. I am not sure this symptom has a formal name.

 

Then as I was sitting in a chair, I began to notice my body was ever so slightly swaying to the left and right. For once, this is a symptom with a formal name: truncal ataxia. That got me into the bathroom to get some more info, and here I immediately saw yet another strange symptom. My head was ever so slightly bobbing up and down, also a symptom with a formal name: a yes-yes tremor.

 

Finally, when I’d closed my eyes, I would see shimmering. You can, yourself, produce this symptom. Face a light of some sort. Now close your eyes and wave your hand up and down in front of your face. You’ll see the shimmering of the light. This is exactly what I experienced except I wasn’t waving my hand in front of any light! This sounds like it might be some form of nystagmus, but it’s not clear if it corresponds to a known form of it.

 

At this point, I was freaked out and headed to the ER where an MRI was performed. It showed nothing out of the ordinary. However, the ER doc mentioned viral cerebellitis, and when I looked it up, I found a specific web page, stripped from the current web, that described my symptoms to a tee. For once, I have a definitive diagnosis: (viral) cerebellitis.

 

I put “viral” in parentheses because I don’t know if we can say for certainty the nature of the causative organism. Who is to say that after all these years, the Lyme of 2006 never went away and suddenly found its way into my cerebellum? I do, suspect, this is unlikely and that, in fact, this was a case of viral cerebellitis.

 

One question that has been asked of me is why the ER didn’t do a spinal tap. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect it was because I didn’t have a fever.

 

After several more days, the headache disappeared and some of the other symptoms followed. However, the shimmering and sensation that my eyes were moving up and down when they were closed actually intensified over time. I also began to notice tremors, sometimes, as a resting tremor, in my hands. Finally, a symptom that developed over time was that I started waking up super early. Yet another symptom was that I would occasionally see double momentarily. When I refocused my eyes, the doubling effect vanished. Finally, I often had trouble balancing on one leg. The periodic double vision and balancing issue would persist for many years before mostly disappearing.