BEST OF JODY’S BOX: RACING IS A REVELATION, AND COMING THAT CLOSE TO LOSING IT IS A NIGHTMARE.

It was 3:30 in the morning, and I was heading west on Interstate 60 to get some work done at the office before anybody showed up. I always get up early. I like the solitude. At first, I thought that the truck in front of me was spraying fluid on my windshield because it got all blotchy. But then I realized that there was no truck in front of me. Then, just as suddenly, everything started to spin, my vision narrowed and it looked like lightning bolts were streaking across the front of my hood. I was totally disoriented but still doing 70 mph. Without looking, which wouldn’t have done any good anyway, I swerved towards the side of the side of the freeway. By sheer luck, I caught a glimpse of a solid white line and followed it down an off-ramp. I have no idea what off-ramp it was, because I couldn’t see any signs or read them. At the bottom of the ramp, I made a slow turn to the left and parked under the underpass. My brain was reeling, and I was hyperventilating. I opened the truck door and vomited. I believed that I was suffering from a brain aneurysm. I told myself that I didn’t want to die under a filthy freeway underpass. I wanted to die in bed at the age of 98. But to do that, I needed to get back home. I was so disoriented that when I turned up the on-ramp to go back east on Interstate 60, I drove down the white line on the side of the highway at a scintillating 40 mph.

When I got home, I staggered into the house and called for Lovely Louella to take me to the emergency room. I had a death grip on the door jam to keep from falling down. She was as calm as a cucumber as she loaded me into her SUV. At the emergency room, the doctor put me in a wheelchair and trundled me off to get a CAT scan and, when it was inconclusive, an additional MRI. Finally, he came in and told me that I wasn’t having a brain aneurysm and that my brain was “beautiful.”

He told me to follow his finger with my eyes and then turned to his intern and said, “Did you see that?” The intern nodded and Louella asked the doctor to show her what he showed the intern. She said, “That’s crazy.” It turns out that my eyes followed his finger, but they vibrated like “crazy.”

“You have vertigo. It is a close relative of tinnitus, sea sickness and effects your balance,” the doctor told me. “We are going to keep you for observation because we don’t want you falling down, hitting your head and getting a brain aneurysm.” He was very funny.

I said, “I’m not staying here. I’m going home. Have the nurse push me out the door in a wheelchair and Louella will have her SUV waiting with the door open.” The doctor didn’t like my plan. He told me that there was no known cure for vertigo and that in most cases it goes away in a couple days, but that there are no known drugs, operation or medical procedures to fix it. He explained that the presumed cause of vertigo was that microscopic crystals in your inner ear, that send electrical signals to your brain to tell it where “level” is, escape from your inner ear and send false signals to your brain, making you see the world in a Fun House mirror. He asked me a bunch of questions about my activities and said that my vertigo could have been caused by a motocross crash, flying aerobatics in my plane, or by tossing and turning in my sleep. I hadn’t crashed or flown my plane lately, but sure enough I had been sleeping.

Over time, I stopped walking like a drunken sailor and holding on to things to stay upright—as long as I didn’t look up or down. With those limitations, I went back to racing. I started out by just riding around in Glen Helen’s big parking lot. I felt fine. Next, I went to the scrambles track and did a few fast laps. All went well. So, I went to the starting line for my first moto since my vertigo attack. I got a good start and felt comfortable. I don’t know why I never considered that Glen Helen’s giant hills might set off any alarms. Mt. Saint Helen is 220-feet straight up and 220-feet straight down. When I got to the top on my first lap, I felt like I was cured, but as I started down the long, fast and bumpy downhill, I thought that the bike of the guy in front of me was spraying fluid on my goggles. They got all blotchy. If I had been in a room, instead of the great outdoors going 40 mph straight down, I would have said that the room was spinning. When I got to the bottom, I didn’t turn, I didn’t shut off, I didn’t stop and I didn’t know how I ended up speeding across the track’s infield. I did find my way back to the pits, where my pals held my bike upright while I crawled off.

Since then, I’ve had great days where I can race without any effects and days when three laps into a moto I find myself going wide open through the giggle weeds wondering where the track went. At first, I tried to tough it out in hopes that I could ride through the dizziness. I couldn’t. So, since that day on Interstate 60, I don’t know what is going to happen when I go to the starting line, but I keep lining up because on the days when I don’t get dizzy, I feel like a kid again. Racing is a revelation, and coming that close to losing it is a nightmare.