'Dizzy' author recounts a decade of being marooned by chronic illness

"I ... pressed my body hard against the mattress in search of the center, the still place. Anyplace. ... Desperate to get away from whatever was happening, I pushed the covers off inch by inch, keeping my head as still as possible, and slid down to all fours next to the bed. ... I was clawing more than crawling, the carpet rushing beneath my hands like a river just let loose from a dam."

"Things didn't even start to "right themselves" for Weaver until about a decade later, when she met a doctor who, instead of trying to make her symptoms fit a prefab narrative, sat with her for two hours and "asked question after question, like a detective on the path of a hardened criminal." In her arresting new memoir called Dizzy, Weaver, herself, deftly avoids the prefab narrative that accounts of deliverance from chronic illness usually fall into."

Rachel Weaver awoke in January 2006 to violent internal vertigo that made the bedroom walls fold and slide. She sought physical stability by pressing into the mattress, crawling across carpet, and attempting routine tasks that she hoped would restore normalcy. Symptoms persisted for about a decade, disrupting daily life and resisting quick explanations. A doctor eventually spent two hours listening and asking detailed questions, initiating diagnostic progress and deeper understanding. The account rejects simple restitution narratives that promise full restoration and instead concentrates on the prolonged, ambiguous experience of being marooned by chronic illness.

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