MdDS Relapse
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.