Vestibular Adventures

Last week, the ER nurse gave me a prescription for meclizine, the main ingredient of dramamine, to treat my vertigo. My world had been spinning for almost a week at that point She said it wasn’t a cure but would lessen the dizziness. “How does it work?” I asked. “If it doesn’t fix the problem, what does it do?”

Surprisingly, she couldn’t answer, but, impressively, she googled it. She read aloud something like this: “Meclizine is an antihistamine and anticholinergic medication used to suppress the inner ear, or vestibular system.” That wasn’t much help, frankly, but I appreciated the effort.

At home later that day, I (of course) looked it up myself. I was especially intrigued by the word vestibular. I knew it had to do with the inner ear, but felt compelled to know what it meant, that is, what its root was.

As I began searching, suddenly vestibule jumped out at me. I know what a vestibule is. It’s the entryway to a church, just outside the doors of the sanctuary. It’s where the ushers hang out during Mass rather than attending to the the sermon. The term seems to be interchangeable these days with narthex, although I associate that term with my Protestant in-laws and never heard it in the Catholic churches I grew up in. Narthex comes from the Greek word for fennel, because the area’s narrow shape mimicked the plant’s. But narthex has nothing to do with my ears, so we’re moving on.

There is an impressive bunch of things in the inner ear, including the cochlea, the stapes, the otolith organs, the urticle, the saccule, and a fluid called endolymph. So many words! So many etymological blog posts!

Focus!

Turns out the vestibular area of the ear has an actual vestibule. It’s a fluid-filled cavity that, as you probably know, aids in balance. It’s a space, just like the vestibule in St. Paul’s in North Canton, the church I grew up in. The Latin word vestibulum means “an entrance hall,” or, the open space between the street and the entrance to a Roman house.

Vestibulum in turn derives from the noun vestis (as in vest, vestment, and divest, and many others). The vestibule was the appropriate place to remove or adjust your outdoor clothing. The suffix -bulum frequently refers to a place.

The answer to my emergency room question was something like this. The antihistamine in my vertigo medication prevents the inner ear’s discombobulation from being communicated to the brain. I used only one tablet, and my vertigo resolved itself a day or two later. My vestibular inner-ear space has, thankfully, settled down.

As to vertigo, if you’ve ever experienced it, you won’t be surprised to learn that it comes from the Latin word for “turn” or “spin.”