My weirdest Christmas: on Boxing Day I vomited in the sink – and began to suspect I had a mysterious condition | Christmas

Waking up with a foggy head and a spinning room on December 26 is surely not an uncommon situation. Who among us has not felt the effects of excess on Christmas Day?

These were my immediate thoughts when I woke up in such a state in my parents’ house in Dublin two years ago. An hour later, the room continued its incessant whirlwind, nausea mounted and it became difficult to stand. So far, so Christmas hangover. I stayed in bed and waited for things to get better. They didn’t do it. Little by little, my family members poked their heads into my childhood bedroom and wondered if everything was okay. I could only say that I felt quite strange.

After a few hours, I thought I had gotten over the worst, so I joined my mother, sister and wife in the kitchen. Moments later, they watched helplessly as I vomited into the kitchen sink, a silent bond created between them.

This process repeated several times the next day, so I consulted a doctor. The GP diagnosed a case of vertigo: not Hitchcockian vision, but dizziness and nausea, usually caused by inner ear problems. Often this only lasts a few seconds, but there can be longer incidents. I was prescribed medication to restore order.

The strangest thing is that at the time I was working as a producer on a podcast documentary for BBC Sounds called Havana Helmet Club, investigating Havana Syndrome – the 2016 case of mysterious brain injuries affecting CIA agents and US embassy officials in Cuba and beyond.

I had spent the previous year studying every aspect of this strange story: starting with the set of symptoms that patients had begun to experience, seemingly out of nowhere. Most reported hearing piercing noises in their homes in Havana, followed by overwhelming headaches, dizziness, nausea and, ultimately, lasting brain trauma. There has been speculation about Russian microwave weapons and jokes about an “immaculate concussion.” Politicians, scientists, diplomats and security experts were constantly discussing it. Some claimed people had simply imagined it or overreacted to the sound of crickets – suggestions the victims were quite hostile to. Doctors explained that even if there was no weapon, other triggers – physical and mental – could cause a dramatic reaction in the brain.

Shortly before my own incident, I had listened to an interview a colleague had done with a neurologist. The doctor was talking about how when you become aware of a certain part of your body, your mind can then focus too much on it. If you’re told that you have a family history of heart disease, for example, you might suddenly start to notice that you feel short of breath when going up stairs. In the weeks following this listening, I sometimes noticed mild headaches when I leaned over or stood up quickly.

In my dizzy state, I tried to explain all this to the doctor. I wasn’t pretending to have been drawn into a dastardly espionage plot. Plus, I wondered if I had somehow imagined myself sick. Could something a person read take over their body? When I finished this spiel, she looked at me politely, said, “That’s true, yes,” and explained that this was not an unusual affliction. The pills should do the trick after a week, she told me, and if it happened again, I would need vestibular physiotherapy.

She was right, of course, and it went relatively well. But it made me think of all those who have been affected by Havana syndrome. In addition to needing care, many were consumed by the need to know what had happened to them. My illness was minor, but I could see how easily such thinking can take over when one is struck unexpectedly. The list of causative factors for dizziness and vestibular disorders includes everything from lying down to standing to air travel and many other factors in between. What’s most dismaying for someone in their 40s is that it “becomes progressively more common with age.” We are where we are.

Rather than going down the rabbit hole, I decided it was better to just be grateful that my episode of ill health happened that day. After my big Christmas dinner – even though the medication meant I could only sip non-alcoholic “champagne” on New Year’s Eve. Perhaps a fate worse than the vertigo itself.