About that wheelchair...
I mentioned in an earlier post that our underground house was designed so that I could get around it easily in my wheelchair, and that we hadn't known that moving to Arkansas would get me out of the wheelchair, and several of you asked for an explanation. I'll try; it's hard to make it clear in written language, but I'll try.

What put me in the wheelchair in the first place was severe rotational vertigo. I don't know if you've ever had the experience of having drunk more alcohol than you should have, and then having the room seem to be whirling around you. Rotational vertigo is like that, except that it doesn't go away. It kept getting worse, until the time came when I couldn't stand or walk; instead, I would stagger into walls, and fall down, and various other ungraceful maneuvers. The rotation was superimposed on an additional form of vertigo, in which every surface I was in contact with moved constantly under me .... like being on a small boat on a choppy sea. Often, there was nausea, although I'm not inclined to motion sickness; I suppose it was because there were so many different kinds of motion going on at the same time. It was horrible; the wheelchair at least made it possible for me to stay out of bed, after a fashion.

I was in California then, and I had the fanciest doctors -- La Jolla doctors -- that anyone could have asked for. Over many many months I saw platoons of specialists; I had the well-known Every Test Known To God And Man, including a number of tests I wouldn't have believed existed if they hadn't been happening to me. None of this helped, because all the tests showed nothing whatsoever wrong with me, and as always happens in such cases the medpros decided that it was all in my head, and I was sent to various psychiatrists; they couldn't find anything wrong with me either. Eventually I was so incapacitated by this nothing-at-all-wrong-with-me that I had to retire from my teaching post, and -- as you already know -- we moved to Arkansas.

When we got there I went to the internist I'd been referred to by the fancy California doctors, and his first move was to send me to an ear/nose/throat specialist. Who, five minutes into his examination, said, "Ma'am, you don't need a doctor, you need a dentist," and went off to have his secretary make a dental appointment for me.

I went into that dentist's office afflicted with that horrible rotational vertigo, everything whirling around me; I came out an hour later with the problem fixed. Not that the vertigo was gone; it wasn't. I was still on a small boat in a choppy sea, and I still am, to this day. But the rotational part of it was almost fixed. It was almost gone.

I say "almost" because once in a while, there'll be a sudden episode of the rotational stuff; the floor just swoops out from under my feet and the whole world swings up to the right, taking me with it. Because it always happens without warning -- and is as likely to happen when I'm next to a hot stove or a fireplace or a stairwell as it is to happen anywhere else -- I don't go out without a cane. And I never babysat for my grandchildren until they were competent at walking, because I was terrified that it might happen when I was carrying one of them, and that they'd be injured when I fell.

But in a single hour with an Arkansas dentist I went from being the prisoner of chronic rotational vertigo that was getting ever more severe to being someone who might have thirty seconds of the filthy stuff half a dozen times a year. That, in my perceptions, qualifies as a miracle many times over.

Not once, in the years I spent with all the fancy doctors, had anyone ever so much as suggested that a dentist might be able to help. Not once.