A Messy World Gets Messier

So, as reported earlier, I spent about two hours Monday night at a Diabetes Management class to help me better understand the disease which my Significant Other was diagnosed with back in August.

Wednesday afternoon I spent another hour up close and personal with a test known as electronystagmography in an attempt to better understand my own recurrent bouts of vertigo.

I first became intimately familiar with the pleasures of vertigo some 12 years ago when I had a bout of labyrinthitis (i.e., an infection of the inner ear). Back then I was basically too dizzy to leave my bed for a week or so except for the most essential of reasons. It was a month of two before I stopped feeling wobbly and more or less back to normal.

I was pretty stable after that until about two years ago when I started suffering from so-called drop attacks - sudden spells of vertigo that left me falling to the ground, unable to precisely orient myself in space.

In the last few months, these very rare attacks have become less rare.

On Labor Day I was sitting in the car at the car wash, quietly waiting our turn with the Scrubbing Brushes, when without any warning whatsoever I felt as if I'd been pushed off a cliff. It was extremely upsetting and discombobulating, to say the least, and led to a six-hour visit to my local ER to rule out a stroke, a heart attack, and other serious conditions.

As near as can be determined at this point, it's just that old inner ear of mine again, refusing to play nice with my brain.

Now, I don't tell this story because I think it's especially interesting, or because I'm looking for sympathy and understanding, or because it provides the essential background information you need to truly appreciate my adventures in the Land of Tinnitus (which I'll spare you). Instead, I am offering it here as merely one more example of how extremely problematic and imperfect the allegedly perfectly designed human body really is.

The inner ear is such a little thing, really, its total weight amounting to a ridiculously small part of our overall heft, and yet even a relatively minor problem with it can leave us unable to perform such common daily tasks as standing up and walking from Point A to Point B.

A tiny virus can mess it up. So can small amounts of any number of common and ordinarily safe drugs. A simple head movement can throw it (and the crystals that it harbors) out of whack. Even a change in barometric pressure might induce an out-of-the-blue attack of life-changing dizziness.

Imagine if Ford built a car that might flip over every time the barometric pressure changes! Imagine a Ford sales representative trying to assure you that, despite this minor idiosyncrasy, this car was perfectly designed. Now imagine yourself actually buying this car instead of walking over to the Chevy dealer who sells vehicles that are much more likely to keep all four tires safely on the road.

Ha!

If the inner ear were a car component, lawsuits would be filed, the government would insist on a recall, and the manufacturer would soon be bending over backwards apologizing and trying to make things right or face bankruptcy.

Why don't theists hold their allegedly perfect creator gOds to the same standards they hold automakers?

If contemplating the absurd beliefs and antics of these theists *isn't* making YOU dizzy by now, maybe you need to have YOUR inner ears checked out!