June 25, 2009 at 1:09 am
After dealing with this spinning head stuff for about a month now, I was finally able to get in to see an ENT specialist today. Saw the same guy who did ear surgeries on both my kids when they were wee little ones and had lots of ear infections.
So, if there’s one condition that would just be too perfect for a U2 fan to come down with … a condition that involves dizziness and spinning heads … what condition would that be? I’ll give you one hint:
Yep. Unos, dos, tres, get dizzy. I’ve got Vertigo. Technically, I have Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo:
What are the symptoms?
The main symptom is a feeling that you are spinning or tilting when you are not. This can happen when you move your head in a certain way, like rolling over in bed, turning your head quickly, bending over, or tipping your head back.
BPPV usually lasts a minute or two. It can be mild, or it can be bad enough to make you feel sick to your stomach and vomit. You may even find it hard to stand or walk without losing your balance.
That pretty much describes it to a “T”, but I’m lucky to have not had any vomiting or nausea. Everything else – been there, done that. The doctor gave me an information sheet that also talked about feeling lightheaded for several hours at a time, which is how things were at their worst a few weeks ago — couldn’t get anything done at all.
On the bright side, it’s really not terribly serious. The most common treatment is nothing. There are some procedures that can be done to minimize the dizziness, but most people learn to live with this. As long as I control my head movements, I should be okay. Driving isn’t a problem. Yardwork has been okay. Playing with the dogs, the kids, doing the shopping – all good.
I’m supposed to monitor my dizziness for the next week — which way am I turning my head when I get dizzy, what position am I in, etc. And I’ll see the doc again late next week and we’ll decide what, if anything, needs to be done.
Thanks to all who emailed after the last post about this. Really appreciate the thoughts and support. Now if you’ll just tell my daughter to stop walking around the house singing, “Hello, hello, you’ve got a disease called Vertigo,” everything will be much better!
June 20, 2009 at 10:28 pm
“Follower” counts on Twitter are highly overrated. There’s limited value in having tons of followers that you don’t know and don’t converse with. I consider myself blessed to have as many followers as I do (see right), but the truth is that I don’t know most of them, don’t speak with most of them … and, frankly, don’t have a clue why so many people follow me.
But numbers are numbers, and this post is all about numbers because, for now, I’m more popular on Twitter than a bunch of Seattle Seahawks! Like, for example, Walter Jones and Nate Burleson:
I have more followers than both of them combined! I’m also ahead of the two TJ’s — Houshmandzadeh and Duckett.
I’m even more popular than 1st-round draft pick Aaron Curry, whose Twitter account was listed in the latest ESPN The Magazine.
But my glory comes to an end there, sadly. For I am nowhere near as popular as Matt Hasselbeck.
Still, five out of six ain’t bad, right? (Not that I’m bragging or anything.) Let’s hope the Seahawks do better on the field than they’re doing on Twitter. Just sayin’….
June 19, 2009 at 11:49 pm
I tested myself last night (Thursday). I hopped in the car and drove three hours to a remote part of Idaho to see Collective Soul do a tiny, little warm-up gig before their main tour starts next week. They advertised the show as being in Coeur d’Alene, but it was actually closer to Worley, Idaho, about a half-hour south of CDA.
I’m still fighting the spinning head thing, but mostly in the mornings. (I see an ENT specialist next week.) Usually I’m doing pretty good by about 11 a.m. each day. At the show, I didn’t have any dizziness issues … but my McDonald’s dinner wasn’t agreeing with me, and since I decided to join the crowd and rush the stage during the third song, I was surrounded by people, getting very hot and sweaty, and extremely thirsty. I left the mob at the front after the band’s main set and found some ice water. Then went back and watched a bit of the encore before calling it a night and leaving early. (No, I’d never leave a U2 concert early.)
That’s a six-hour roundtrip drive to watch about 80 minutes of live music. And it was all worth it because I got to hear “The World I Know” live — surely one of the best 4-5 songs ever written. I could listen to that 20 times in a row and not get tired of it. In fact, if you check my Last.fm profile, I probably have listened to it 20 times in a row!
Other than being a little tired from the long drive, and having a small headache, the test went well. But hopefully they’ll play somewhere a little closer next time.
Here’s my full set of Collective Soul photos on Flickr from last night.
June 6, 2009 at 12:26 am
“Vertigo” was too easy to use as a title, so I chose a relatively obscure U2 b-side from almost 20 years ago as the headline on this post, and then edited it since I’m a guy.
This has been one of the strangest 10 days I’ve ever had. There’s something wrong with me, and I have no clue what it is. It’s very possibly nothing more than a virus, and deep down I think that’s the case. But it could be something entirely different and more serious, too. Hope not.
A couple Wednesdays ago, while I was reading with T before she went to bed, I suddenly got dizzy, felt faint, and my head banged against the wall in her room. It settled down after about 10 seconds and I just chalked it up to being tired and the hot weather we were having. Then it continued the next day, and the day after that — dizziness, lightheadedness, headaches, etc. Then it got better for a couple days, then it came back again, and that’s when I finally went to urgent care.
The doc there didn’t seem too confident, but he thinks it’s some kind of inner ear imbalance/infection, combined with allergies (even though I haven’t had allergies since I was a kid). So I got a couple prescriptions from him and have been taking them for three days now. I’m still waking up dizzy and groggy in the mornings, but the past two days I’ve felt pretty good in the afternoons and evenings. And here I am writing a blog post after midnight, so that’s a sign that maybe things are returning to normal.
I had to cancel plans last week for a quick trip to Seattle with the family (although this dizzy stuff wasn’t the only reason), and canceled plans again this week for a conference in Seattle I was supposed to attend. I’ve already canceled a webinar I was supposed to give in a week or so, and I’m wondering if I’ll feel up to driving to Coeur d’Alene on the 18th to see Collective Soul.
I’m not even sure why I’m posting about all this. There are several people I know, some very close to us, who are dealing with much more serious health problems (think cancer) and I’m not looking for sympathy. I think there’s a two-fold purpose to this post:
- To ask for patience from friends. If you’ve been waiting on an email from me over the past 10 days, or expecting me to finish/continue some project we were talking about or working, I’m now way behind on everything. Up until the last couple days, I’ve only been able to get in front of the computer for a couple hours at a time before things would start to spin.
- To publicly flog myself for not having a personal doctor. Yep. That’s why I had to go to urgent care. It was either that or the emergency room. Either way, I’d be seeing a doctor who’s never met me before. That’s not exactly helpful when it comes to diagnosing things. I’m 40 now. I should’ve found a personal doctor years ago. Maybe this post reminds me to go out and do it. Stupid, stupid, stupid….
Anyway, not trying to make a big deal out of anything or look for sympathy. Just felt like talking about this craziness that’s been going on. And felt guilty about not writing a blog post here in more than two weeks, too.
Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
May 9, 2009 at 3:20 pm
I ordered my Google Profile Business Cards at about 1:30 am PT on May 1st, right after I wrote the story about them on Search Engine Land. And here we are, 7 business days later, and my cards have arrived.
Not sure exactly what I’ll do with them, since I haven’t bothered to do much with my Matt McGee Google profile page. Plus, I already have biz cards for Small Business Search Marketing, the four local blogs that Cari and I write, and even @U2. It’s not like I’m desperate for more business cards, but seemed kinda cool to be one of the first to order the Google cards.
March 30, 2009 at 8:45 pm
Just to follow-up on last night’s post about haircuts and lawn care … Sean took this photo of me while I was out in the back yard yesterday. He’s loving his camera.
February 16, 2009 at 1:12 am
I have a lot of them coming up again this year. Not as many as last year, which was completely ridiculous. But still, it’s looking like I’m traveling at least once every month for the first half of the year.
And then the U2 tour starts in the second half of the year, so who knows what’s going to happen then.
Thing is … I think this may need to be the last year of so much work/business travel for me. I love going to the search marketing conferences and seeing all the great friends who I usually only trade emails with, but I practically go “off the grid” when I’m gone. The email backs up, and that’s a problem when you get about 200 emails per day (as I do). And I get no client work done, no personal work done, no U2-related work done, etc.
Most of all, every time I leave, I miss Cari and the kids more than ever. For a variety of reasons, I’m quite aware these days that our time is limited, and no one ever lay on their death bed thinking, I wish I’d spent more time traveling and working. I just don’t like being gone so much.
So I’m thinking next year I need to not be.
January 2, 2009 at 12:04 am
Now that 2008 is over, I’ve been digging into Google Analytics for most of my blogs and checking out the most popular articles I’ve written. It’s easy to guess what the popular stuff is on most of the other blogs, but not on this one. I don’t do a whole lot of promotion of this blog, but it seems that when I do submit a post to StumbleUpon or Facebook, it always seems to bring a spike in traffic over here.
Anyway, here are the five most popular blog posts from MattMcGee.com in 2008:
1.) How I Lowered Our Credit Card Interest Rates – this one seems pretty popular on StumbleUpon
2.) How To Build a Devoted Community, by Mixx.com – I’ve just completely run out of time to stay active on Mixx and Digg these days
3.) My Top 5 Pixar Movies – this was pre-Wall-E
4.) How NOT to Market on Flickr
5.) Top 10 Signs You’re Spamming Sphinn
That’s it. Not that it means anything to anyone, but I get a kick out of stats and tracking stuff like this.
December 25, 2008 at 2:12 pm
… to shop for yourself!
Actually, it wasn’t supposed to be that way, but I ended up buying myself a kinda-sorta Christmas present on Christmas Eve at Circuit City:
It’s like this: Sean’s computer monitor died a few days ago. So he’s been without a computer. My laptop died on Tuesday, and after spending a couple hours on the phone with Apple Tech Support, the decision was that I needed to get a new hard drive.
So, on Christmas Eve I went to Circuit City to get myself a new hard drive. Sean asked me to look for a monitor for him, and if I found one that he could afford (he has some money saved up), to buy it and then he’d pay me back.
Well, the hard drive was easy to find. But there were no monitors left in his price range. There was, however, this gorgeous, Samsung, 22-inch LCD monitor for $209. So I decided to get it … and if Sean wanted it, he could pay for half and the rest would count as a Christmas gift from mom and dad. Or, option 2 was that I would keep this monitor and give Sean my Sony 19-inch monitor.
He chose option 2. So, while I went out with the plan to shop for him, I ended up getting myself a sweet, new Christmas present!
Merry Christmas to you! I hope Santa brought you lots of goodies, and please also remember the reason for the season. Count your blessings. 
October 9, 2008 at 4:17 pm
I know the economy is in trouble (”tanking” seems to be a common description) … and the election has people on edge … things seem to be spinning out of control (they’re really not) … and everyone’s nervous about the general state of the world.
No worries. All is right with the world. My fantasy football team, the Instant Breakfast, is back in 1st place.
Rest assured, this is the normal way of events. I’m the two-time defending champ in this fantasy football league, which is made up of my fellow marketing peers. Yep. I’m feeling good. No spinning out of control here. No nerves. Not on edge. Just the usual — including a four-game winning streak after losing in Week One.
I’m just doing my part to live up to the sign that hangs on my office wall……
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