Transcript: My ER Trip to Grey's Anatomy: Gen Z

What Rob Long's hot stroke doctors taught him about TV

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

Not long ago, I woke up and had an impossible time just trying to stand upright. I was dizzy and sick and spent some time collapsed in bed and some time throwing up, and was eventually convinced to go to the emergency room and present myself, listing sideways, for examination.

Turns out, I had vertigo, which was terrible but better than the alternative, which was a massive debilitating stoke.

And what I learned about vertigo was, there are three types. There’s the benign positional kind, which you get if you knock your head around a bit, and ironically gets better if you knock your head around a little bit. And there’s the inflammation kind, which gets better when you gobble steroids. And then there’s something called neuritis, which doesn’t get better so much as eventually fades away, seven weeks later. And which I found out later is sort of a made-up word anyway because sometimes doctors don’t know what caused the vertigo and they hate that so they make up a word. People in show business do this too — it’s what second act jeopardy is.

But that’s the kind I had, the third unknown kind, and I know this because I banged my head around and took prednisone and it didn’t go away. Also, I did a lot of weird exercises, like dart my eyes back and forth and snap my head from side to side like a demented runway model trying to wake up the nerve that connects the inner ear to the brain and is the reason why we don’t all lurch around like we’re on a small boat in high seas.

Here’s another thing I learned: When you go to the emergency room and tell them you’re dizzy and falling over and vomiting, they immediately send you to see what they call “the stroke team” — they’re so alarmed and urgent, in fact, that they do this before even getting your insurance information — and when they admit you to the hospital for tests, you are quickly nearly naked in a bed surrounded by the neurological team who ask you questions and demand that you follow the pen they’re holding as it moves from side to side and here’s where I am going to say two things, one of which is the kind of thing people sometimes get fired for, and the other is an observation about show business and I’ll let you figure out which is which.