Roberts: I choose to believe in miracles

Einstein said, "There are two ways to live your life: You can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle."

I chose to live my life as if everything is a miracle and to always be alert to seeing the miracles that occur around me. Remember, if you do not train yourself to see the little ones, you will never know you had one!

Like living with little rocks in your head. I have often been told by people who are less than fond of me, "You have rocks in your head!" But I never believed it until Dr. Mark Simpson recently told me.

The day he told me, I awoke too dizzy to walk. A person seems to automatically think the worst possible thoughts in such a situation, and I am no different. I was thinking "stroke." My wife drove me to his office, and he performed some behavioral tests that convinced him I had tiny crystals in my inner ear. So he bravely told me, "You, sir, have rocks in your head."

The best I can describe it in nonmedical terms is that tiny crystals form in the inner ear, and you don't notice it unless you disturb the rock pile. If you move in certain ways and shake up the rocks, you become very dizzy, and sometimes it lasts up to two weeks.

I can tell you, it isn't any fun at all. Dizziness, nausea and a constant feeling of imbalance. But maybe if it happens to you, my telling you about it will keep you from even worse thoughts of a stroke. Just be glad you had a little miracle of rocks in the head instead of a stroke.

The next day I had the little miracle of being sent to physical therapist Keri Redfern. She taught me some simple exercises to restabilize the rock pile and get over the dizziness and nausea. Another miracle, but you don't count little miracles when you live life with the Einsteinian-Daltonian view that it's all a miracle.

One challenge in restabilizing the rock pile is to sleep on your back with an extra pillow for a while. That's not easy when you have been a lifetime side sleeper. I have always been a flipper, sleeping on one side awhile and flipping.

One night after a restless night of being half-awake, I fully awoke and came to the computer to write this column and was still too dizzy. I went back to bed and asked my wife to please wake up and rub a couple of places where arthritis likes to camp out in my body. I desperately needed some good sleep to face a full day of scheduled activity. She did. Another miracle because few people can arouse out of a deep sleep to massage you.

I then eased off to sleep and had three hours of the deepest, most refreshing sleep I have ever had. I awoke much less dizzy and refreshed and decided to write my column on life's little miracles.

After all, I have been experiencing one after another ever since I awoke terrified I was having a stroke. Who can better do it than a man who is living a "little miracle" kind of life?

Email Dalton Roberts at DownhomeP@aol.com.

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