Last year around this time I wrote about my 5-month experience with MdDS (Mal de débarquement syndrome or “I’m stuck on an ocean buoy in a storm” syndrome). From October 2025 to June 2026, I was pretty much back to normal. I weaned off of Paxil (Paroxetine) in January and felt great.

In those ~8 months, the only symptom I still experienced was instant dizziness when walking on a treadmill or moving sidewalk. Easy enough to avoid. I took roundtrip flights to San Diego and Hawaii without issue. I even rode on a boat in rough weather while in Hawaii and only had the usual motion sickness symptoms I always get. In early June, we flew to Denver for a concert and it seems like the flight back home re-triggered my MdDS.

This time around

A few days after our return flight, I was feeling MdDS symptoms again: dizziness, persistent rocking motion, headaches, and gravitational pulling. This time the symptoms came on really slowly. Slowly enough that I waited a couple weeks to see if they would subside on their own. But as they continued to get worse, I went back on Paxil in hopes it would resolve it again.

Unfortunately, it didn’t. I do think the medication helped keep my symptoms less severe, though? I didn’t experience anything like the worst days I had last year and overall things were bad, but not terrible. My symptoms did seem to ebb and flow more. There were several mornings where I felt pretty good, but by the afternoon I was flattened. I learned to stop saying “I don’t want to jinx it, but I’m feeling pretty good right now.”

I was way more sensitive to exercise and heat, so I stopped going on dog walks entirely and tried to keep indoors during the brutal Phoenix summer. Car rides and hammock swinging were a temporary reprieve last year, but this time caused my symptoms to spike so much afterward I tried to avoid those too.

Luckily the brain fog wasn’t nearly as bad this time around and I was able to work in longer chunks. A new symptom I did experience was blurred vision with close-up stuff and the inability to focus my eyes. For a while I thought maybe I just needed reading glasses because of age, but now my vision is back to normal, so I do believe it was the MdDS.

Did I try anything new?

Last time I wrote that I debated taking another flight to see if that might help resolve things. I tried it this time! I took flights to and from Las Vegas for a non-refundable concert trip I booked during my good period. Sad to report it actually made my symptoms worse for a while. :sob:

Coming out of it + theories

At the end of September, I started to slowly feel better each day and by the end of October, I was feeling back to normal. It was a little over four months this go ’round. I am so happy to be on the other side of this again. Praise the lord.

Because the medication didn’t work as expected, and because it resolved at the same time as last year (Sept/Oct), I started to question whether it was really the medication that ultimately did it. Clay thinks it has something to do with the summer heat. We discussed maybe living in a colder place next summer as an experiment. But it also could be heat + plane flight?

We tried to recall everything I might have done on the various flights I took to see if the Denver flight was different somehow. But honestly it feels like it’s just a roll of the dice. It’s really tempting to find a concrete reason this happens, but it also feels like trying to find control in a situation where you don’t have any. I do see how people talk about Mercury being in retrograde or whatever. What do you mean a season of the year breaks my brain?

So what next?

Right now I am enjoying feeling good, walking the dogs again, and picking up projects I put on the back burner. I’m grateful for my health, but I also understand how easy it is to take it for granted. Hours would pass (and now sometimes days) without even thinking about it anymore. What a gift.

I’m going to stay on Paxil for a while. If my MdDS returns while I’m on it, I can either rule it out as a solution or try upping my dose.

I do not know what to do about flying. I am hesitant to do it, but I am not ready to rule out travel. As a first step, I am not going to fly from April through September next year and see if my symptoms return anyway. If they do, we may try escaping the Phoenix heat to see if that helps. And I’ll probably have to get serious about seeking out an MdDS expert and do all I can to get seen.

I watched 124 movies from 2025 and still feel like there’s so many I missed. It was a good year at the cinema!

Found it hard to narrow this list down, so some very honorable mentions are Bugonia, The Long Walk, Roofman, Elio, The Wedding Banquet, Eternity, and of course Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.

I also was very intrigued and horrified by the two Titan sub disaster documentaries (HBO and Netflix each have one) and I absolutely loved the “Rock DJ” sequence from Better Man which was one of the best things I saw all year (technically released late 2024).

Many of these are instant classics, in my opinion! Here are my faves from 2025.

10. Companion

9. Splitsville

8. Sorry, Baby

7. No Other Choice

6. Sinners

5. The Ballad of Wallis Island

4. KPop Demon Hunters

3. Weapons

2. Wake Up Dead Man

1. One Battle After Another

A decent year of TV! Again I tried to prioritize 2025 debuts, so I still have some catching up to do with follow-up seasons of previous faves (especially second seasons of A Man on the Inside and Nobody Wants This).

I did really enjoy the much anticipated season 2 of Severance, the final season of my favorite platonic love story, Mythic Quest, and the latest (final?) season of Poker Face. I also watched season 1 of Ludwig (2024) which was excellent and surely would have made my list last year had I timed things better.

2025 had a few standouts for me and the rest were pretty solid. I actually had a tough time deciding on #10 here, so some honorable mentions are Murderbot, Apple Cider Vinegar, Smoke, Stick (which really surprised me), and the upsetting, but well-made Adolescence.

Here are my fave miniseries and series debuts from 2025.

10. The Residence

9. Paradise

8. The Four Seasons

7. Death By Lightning

6. All Her Fault

5. The Studio

4. Your Friends & Neighbors

3. Dept. Q

2. Pluribus

1. The Pitt

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.