Since May, I’ve been struggling with Mal de débarquement syndrome (MdDS). It’s a brain condition where it feels like you’re constantly moving even when you’re not, usually brought on by extended boat or plane travel. For most people it lasts a few days, for a rare few, it’s years. Mine lasted about five months.

Clay and I took a European river cruise in early May, but it was the long flight home that triggered mine. After a couple weeks of symptoms (more on that later), I visited an ENT who diagnosed me. Once I started reading about it, I realized I had this ten years ago after a long flight home from Brazil. At the time I thought it was vertigo and never received a proper diagnosis. It lasted about a month and resolved when I went under anesthesia for a colonoscopy of all things.

I wasn’t so lucky this time around, unfortunately. MdDS is difficult to diagnose and even harder to treat. There’s no reliable treatment for it and, although research is being done, there’s a serious lack of scientifically tested data. This led me down a path of reading Reddit thread after Reddit thread in hopes someone else’s anecdotal fix could help me. I read every blog and paper I could find, though many of those offered anecdotal stories as well. It seems like my experience isn’t unique and people who suffer with this condition are desperate for information and effective treatment.

What MdDS feels like

The easiest way to describe it is feeling like you’re on a boat all the time. Rocking, swaying, dizziness. In my experience, it’s very different from “sea legs” but it might be like that for others.

Maybe being on an ocean buoy is a better analogy and the waves are rough. The intensity of the waves fluctuates, almost like several people are surrounding you and pulling the buoy with ropes in hopes of knocking you off. And in reality you’re just sitting still.

Your head hurts with the dizziness of it. And although I’ve definitely felt worse acute pain, the persistence made this especially difficult.

Then there’s the gravitational pulling. You know when you ride a rollercoaster or carnival ride and you can feel the gravitational force pulling you against the side of the car? That’s what it feels like in your head. Almost like you’re Harry Potter and a Dementor is trying to pull you out of your body through your skull. It’s horrible and unrelenting.

It took a lot of effort to hold my head upright for more than 30 minutes. I started working from my living room recliner where I could prop my head against a pillow and alternate periods of sitting up and lying flat. I was exhausted all the time. Going to a movie or putting groceries away would knock me out for hours. Socializing was especially taxing.

I had persistent brain fog and could barely complete basic tasks. Most of the time I could only focus on the pain. I hoped at some point I would feel so used to it that I could forget about it, but I never got there.

I’m really grateful that Clay was able to pick up a lot of slack at home and with the dogs. And I’m grateful for a job and team that was so caring and understanding through this. I read that many people have to stop working while they deal with this and I’m so glad I didn’t have to quit my job. 🙏

Oh also, and I didn’t realize it until later, but I stopped dreaming during this period (or at least remembering them). All my life I’ve been a really vivid dreamer and it just shut that part of my brain down somehow.

“Treatment” I tried

There’s a lot of anecdotal “this worked for me” stories, so I tried a lot of things. These can be broken up into three categories:

1. Helped alleviate symptoms temporarily
2. Did not help alleviate symptoms
3. Helped alleviate symptoms longterm

1. Things that helped alleviate symptoms temporarily

One thing that helps in diagnosing MdDS is that your symptoms actually go away temporarily when experiencing passive motion. I found immense relief from my symptoms when I was driving in the car. It was the only time I felt somewhat normal again. Sitting at a long traffic light would be torture until I could start moving again. Just going for a drive was a life saver.

We have a hammock chair swing in our backyard and that was my other place of reprieve. Swinging in the chair gave me immediate relief. It felt like someone removed a 40 pound metal helmet from my head I’d been wearing around and I could finally relax and breathe.

Unfortunately, driving and swinging would often make my symptoms worse afterwards, which is a very cruel thing.

We bought an IKEA rocking chair that helped also—though not as well as the hammock swing. Also I should mention that regularly lying down was also a necessity. It didn’t alleviate symptoms, but it allowed me to relax my muscles and helped with the exhaustion.

Anti-nausea acupressure wristbands also provided some relief, but inconsistently. When they did work they took the pain from an 8 to a 5. Which is not nothing!

2. Things that did not work

• Vestibular physical therapy - The only thing the ENT suggested for me. Sometimes this did nothing and sometimes it would knock me out for a full day. After several weeks, I did not see any improvement. Maybe it would have eventually helped, but the stuff I was reading said it didn’t reliably work for most patients and it was a 30 minute drive and $15 each time, so I gave up.
• Antihistamines (I tried Claritin, Allegra, Zyrtec, and Flonase)
• Decongestants (Sudafed)
• Anti-nausea medication (Bonine, Dramamine)
• THC and CBD gummies - I took a pretty low dose and it didn’t help with symptoms but it did help me sleep.
• Optokinetic head roll exercises - The at-home YouTube version.
• Deep tissue neck and shoulder massage - This was nice for the normal reasons though.
• Walking outside - Being outside did feel better than being inside generally though (it was especially bad when I was in a small room).
• Playing basketball - Something about your hands and feet feeling the ground through the ball. Didn’t help though!
• General anesthesia - Because going under anesthesia worked the last time, I decided to try again (I needed to have surgery to remove a cyst from my elbow). Woke up still dizzy which was a disappointment.

A few things I didn’t try but thought about:

• Benzodiazepines - This is the most common solution I saw from people who were able to resolve their MdDS through medication.
• Acupuncture
• Float in a swimming pool
• Go on a rollercoaster
• Take another long flight
• Go to Mount Sinai in New York for experimental treatment - I reached out but never heard back. Not sure if I actually would have made the trip.

3. What ultimately worked for me

Besides benzos, getting on an SSRI (antidepressant) was one of the most common medications people with MdDS said helped them. Back in January I had purposely gotten off of Paxil (Paroxetine), but I figured I’d get back on it and see if it helped here. Luckily I had a few months of meds still around I didn’t need to explain all this to my therapist (probably not a recommended path, but you do what you gotta do). It took me a while to try this because I really didn’t want to be on a longterm medication again.

But God damn, I wish I’d tried it sooner. In just three weeks I was feeling about 75% back to normal. And two weeks after that, I was back to 100%. No symptoms at all. Hallelujah! No idea what about the SSRI fixed my brain, but I’m not going to question it at this point in time.

I’ve never been more grateful for stillness. I’ve been able to focus again and work on projects. The brain fog is entirely gone and I’ve started dreaming again. What a gift I will not take for granted.

I am scared getting off the medication will make my symptoms return, but I will cross that bridge later. For now, I am really enjoying feeling healthy and getting back into the things I’d put off for five months.

The body is a mystery and healthcare is hard

I must say that even though I was able to get a diagnosis this time around, I don’t expect most people have that experience. This one in particular is tricky and feels easy to brush off. Despite being in immense pain, I always looked pretty stable from the outside.

After the ENT, I tried to get in with a neurologist in Phoenix who wrote a paper about MdDS, but was unable to because of various criteria. It also took over a month before I could get in with the vestibular physical therapist, who hadn’t even heard of the condition.

So I get why doctors can get annoyed with “I read this on the internet” kind of stuff from patients, but sometimes that’s all we have.

Our late pup Helo was precious with his feet. He didn’t like walking on gravel or even grass all that much. He did love to walk on a raised curb like a balance beam.

In our backyard we have two small patches of grass that are bordered by such a curb. Every day, multiple times a day, he would walk the full perimeter. We got to calling it “Helo Trail” and would join him in a single file line.

I wish I had taken more video of him doing it, but this one captures it pretty well.

After he passed, it made us feel a tiny bit better to walk Helo Trail each morning. We miss that guy so much, so we decided to make his trail official with a little dedication.

We ordered a custom trail sign from the Etsy shop SignsbyWoodcarve and it came out perfect.

It brings us daily joy to see this little reminder of him. Occasionally Gravy or Tater will walk the trail and our hearts swell all over again.

Hey there, festival goer.

Were you overzealous and put your festival wristband on too early or too tight? Did you skip the instructions telling you not to do that and now the one-way sliding clip of death is the bane of your existence?

Don’t fret. Let’s get that wristband off without destroying it.

If you’ve landed here, maybe you’ve already seen people suggest the straw technique or the twist technique. Those didn’t work for us either.

What did ultimately work was a soapy ziploc bag technique, as illustrated below.

First, smear some hand soap on your hand and wrist underneath the wristband.

Next, slip your hand into a sandwich-sized ziploc bag. Squeeze the bag’s zipper top under the wristband all the way around your wrist. The bag should now be between your skin and the wristband.

Finally, fold the bag zipper top down over the wristband and pull toward your fingers. The soapy bag should slip right off.

Once the wristband is off, now you can do the straw technique to loosen the clip for later use.

Hopefully now you are filled with joy and relief. But if this technique doesn’t work, I do not know what else to tell you. Sorry! Enjoy your festival.

Lately I’ve been feeling similarly about TV series as I do about movies. There are soo many. Truly hard to keep up.

Still, I really try to watch series in the year they debut. With studios canceling shows just weeks after they release them (wtf), I do try to get my views counted. Although that may be fruitless since my #1 fave this year has already been canceled. 😭

This year we enjoyed watching all of the available seasons of For All Mankind and a truly exceptional fifth season of Fargo. Some honorable mentions are Death and Other Details (already canceled), Baby Reindeer, Agatha All Along, and The Brothers Sun (also already canceled).

I never know where to put comedy specials, but I also loved Rachel Bloom’s Death, Let Me Do My Special which was theatrical, funny, and heartbreaking.

Good news is that some of these are getting a second season! Here are my fave miniseries and series debuts from 2024.

10. Black Doves

9. Mr. & Mrs. Smith

8. How to Die Alone

7. Bad Monkey

6. Presumed Innocent

5. Interior Chinatown

4. A Man on the Inside

3. Nobody Wants This

2. Fallout

1. Kaos

There are too many movies! 😅

But for real, it was tough keeping up with all the movies. Even in the final days of the year as I was furiously trying to get through my list, I kept discovering more! So there’s a bunch from 2024 I still want to watch, but I’m afraid I must call it.

Hoping to do a better job tracking things and actually getting into the cinema in 2025. Follow me on Letterboxd!

Some honorable mentions include Inside Out 2, We Live in Time, Twisters, Dìdi, Heretic, Jake Johnson’s Self Reliance, and I had a lot of fun with John Cena’s Ricky Stanicky.

10. Hit Man

9. It’s What’s Inside

8. Deadpool & Wolverine

7. His Three Daughters

6. Thelma

5. A Real Pain

4. Rebel Ridge

3. My Old Ass

2. Challengers

1. Wicked