Today is the day I am supposed to be cured. “Three months,” the fifth doctor I met says. “You will be fine in three months; it just takes longer for some people.”
I cling to that number, an arbitrary timeframe that gives hope to the hopeless ride I am on. Millions of us in Bangkok felt the earthquake on March 28, 2025. An estimated 16 million people in the greater Bangkok region, plus 63 of Thailand’s 77 provinces, experienced the same tremors. Many of us thought a strange dizziness was coming from within before astonishingly realizing that the ground itself was shaking beneath us.
It was a Friday afternoon, around 1:30p.m., and I was at home getting ready to pick up my two children from school. Their snacks were packed, God forbid I forgot them and chaos would erupt in the car. There would be feelings of mom-guilt like I didn’t love them enough to bring extra sustenance because who knows how much they actually eat at school. Fridays are also ice cream days, a weekly treat they look forward to, and one that I take away when they misbehave. I have never seen a child as focused and silent as when they are intensely licking and slurping every last drop of ice cream, nothing else exists in the world at that moment.
The black curved wooden floor vase we have standing in one corner falls as I am trying to get out the door. I am always late, I am always rushing, there is always traffic on Friday. Why does this vase topple over now? I start feeling my body sway, I think the stress of everything is giving me vertigo. But the vertigo seems to be coming from my feet and hips, not my head. I will deal with it later, I have to go to school. Or do I stop to pick up the vase and risk being delayed yet again? I better get the vase out of the way so the kids don’t destroy it when they get home. I stand it back upright, it falls again seconds later.
The wall next to the vase cracks before my eyes. The split slowly creeps diagonally from the top left corner down to the bottom right. The line is jagged, deep — revealing the cold cement beneath. Oh God, it’s an earthquake and we will need renovations. But I will deal with it later, I have to go to school.
Everything shakes, cabinets open and close at nature’s hands, the vase falls again. Run? Run! Grab the snack bag and join the rest of the residents of the building clamoring down the stairs to safety. We don’t have experience with earthquakes, the fault lines are not in Bangkok, but anything can happen, right? Sixteen floors of panic and tears as I race against time to escape mounds of concrete and steel crashing down on me. There’s no time for logic.
The kids are safely waiting in an open field. They are mad that I am late to get them. The school is prepared and organized, they are trained to be calm in emergencies and unprecedented events. I ask my kids if they were scared. They ask about their ice cream. I tell them everything is closed, that I am not even sure if it is safe to enter malls or if we can go home to our 31-story building. But I have snacks. They start protesting, angry that I was late, snacks will not suffice. They don’t have the capacity to realize a natural disaster should prevent them from getting their weekly frozen treat. We see the nostalgic Wall’s ice cream cart parked in front of the school. Many flavors are sold out, an earthquake does not stop people from living their normal lives. The kids each choose a popsicle, there is calm and peace as they concentrate on devouring every bite before the blazing Bangkok sun trickles the sticky drops down their fingers.
Our building was inspected and it was deemed safe to go up after a few hours. In the shower later that night, I felt the earthquake again. The floor erratically lurched and I clung to the handle of the glass door to steady myself. The movement passed and I continued soaping myself. My husband was in bed looking at his phone — his carefree state agitated me — when I asked him if he had felt anything shaking. He said no, the worst was over and a good night’s rest would make us all feel better in the morning. How many nights of rest would it take for the feeling of being completely alone to go away? The realization that if anything drastic had happened during the earthquake, in the end, who would have saved me? I am the keeper of the children’s schedules, the one who finds everyone’s missing socks, the person who worries if there’s enough protein at meals — the foundation of our home, now shaken and jarred.
I slept deeply but I didn’t feel better in the morning. I felt dizzy and strange, like I was not really myself. It’s normal to not be normal after such a trauma, everyone said. We were all feeling a bit lightheaded and we should be fine in a few days. The government put out articles warning about “post-earthquake drunk syndrome.” “Drunk” made it seem so nonchalant, like we were being punished for a night of revelry, but without the fun. Health advisors said this feeling should last about two weeks but to seek mental support if needed. Drink some ginger tea to calm the nerves, they reported. That sounded easy enough. Just two weeks and things would go back to the way they were.
No one wanted to talk much about the earthquake anymore, but it was all I could think about when I surpassed the two-week mark with no relief. My symptoms kept forcing me to remember the seismic event even though I wanted to forget too, or rather to coexist with only its memory. I couldn’t sit down without the sensation that I was swaying or spinning. It’s just anxiety, people dismissively said. Are you having nightmares and feelings of panic, they asked? I wasn’t. Well, then just breathe, be grateful you still have your breath, many people lost it in this earthquake. No one could see the motion I was experiencing anyway, it was invisible. My mind was in a different orbit asking: “What’s wrong with me?”
I used to love sitting down, it was my favorite activity as a busy mom, but now it made me queasy, my stomach bobbing side to side like the motion of the ocean. I started standing up to eat in the kitchen. Moving gave me relief so I paced back and forth in my apartment, the peeling plaster cracks in the walls omnipresent in the background, but the large paintings hid the worst of it. The floor vase stayed stable and standing.
Days later, I was walking to the front door when suddenly the floor gave out under me. It felt like I was wading through a violent wave, going up and down, my steps still proceeding but not on a paved path. I kept going in my stride, getting thrown in fluctuating directions. My apartment seemed slanted sideways, the ground didn’t feel straight. Now not only did I feel internally in motion when I sat down, but there was also an inexplicable gravitational pull tilting me backwards. Shower time became a surfing session as I bobbed up and down on slippery tiles. I couldn’t brush my teeth without the ground shaking with every flick of my toothbrush.
I called the hospital. I didn’t know who to see. The operator said I needed to make an appointment with a neurologist. Of course — I sounded out of my mind. The doctor examined me. I passed all of her balance tests with my eyes open and closed. She concluded the dizziness was not coming from my brain as I could hold an intelligent conversation. She sent me home with medication for motion sickness and cerebral circulation and asked me to come back in three days. She was certain I would be better.
I was not better. The medication made me feel worse and exacerbated my internal movement. She told me to stop the medicine but became concerned that I had presented with high blood pressure and a high pulse on both visits to the hospital. She referred me to a cardiologist to rule out the dizziness was not coming from my heart. All tests came back normal. The cardiologist diagnosed me with “unspecified dizziness” and said I could see an ENT but he was pretty sure they wouldn’t find anything wrong. I was sent home to wait it out.
Before long, I started experiencing a strong pressure in my right ear. Yes! Finally! The concrete evidence for my dizziness. I made the long-awaited appointment with an ENT certain that they would find an ear infection or some imbalance — something, anything — to put a medically recognized label to eradicate the current diagnosis of “being crazy”. They looked inside my ears, up my nose, down my throat, checked for vertigo, gave me a hearing test, measured ear pressure — everything came back normal. How could that be? I was fine but I was not. I pleaded with the audiologist to check again. He looked at me and casually remarked, “You feel like you’re on a boat, right?”
That was it. That was exactly it. A random passing comment that changed the trajectory of my diagnosis. I had stumbled to find the words to describe the sensations I was feeling. I hadn’t been near a boat in years, how did this come about? How did an earthquake put me here? Why didn’t the doctors I had already seen know? “What do I do?”, I asked the audiologist. “There’s nothing you can do,” he replied sheepishly. “Just go home and wait.”
The internet helped me. It gave me a name. A starting point. Mal de débarquement syndrome (MdDS). The “sickness of disembarkment.” It is rarely documented to come from an earthquake, an AI tool typed, but it is possible in atypical cases. Anything can happen, right? The syndrome usually presents after travel, notably by boat or plane, and is thought to mostly affect women between the ages of 30 to 50. I became a statistic as a 40-year-old female. MdDS is poorly researched, not widely reported, often misunderstood, my searches reveal, as if to make me feel better. There is no “cure.” I didn’t have time for rare and incurable. What about the millions of similar people in Bangkok, many of whom I know, who seemed steady now?
Four visits to the hospital and no help. Where modern medicine failed, I went traditional. I did my own research and began acupuncture. It helped to tremendously calm my body — the anxiety and palpitations that had begun concurrently with MdDS — but it didn’t quell the sensation of being on a boat. On good days, I felt good. On bad days, I questioned why I was laying there with 25 needles stuck in my body to get better.
I continued with acupuncture when my ears started hurting again. A twinge of joy came over me as I made a second ENT appointment, this time with a different doctor, certain they would now find the part of my ear that was throwing me off balance. This time I was prepared to advocate for help, instead of the previous times when I went in scared, uncertain and powerless. I now knew I checked all the boxes for MdDS. I was on an imaginary boat, I could clearly list all my symptoms, I would get a solution. But they didn’t find anything wrong with my ears — again. “Post-earthquake dizziness syndrome,” the doctor said confidently. “It has been studied in earthquake-prone countries like Japan and there they report these feelings can last for up to three months.”
I decided to believe him because he gave me a date that I could look forward to for relief. I had been rocking for a month now, I could persevere for two more. I resolved to stop going back to the hospital to find answers for a problem that no one could see. I was tired of making appointments that ran late and forced me to rush to school for pickup. I was tired of spending all my free time wondering why my body was failing me. But just as quickly as I found hope, I would lose it again when I would feel the rocking. I started calling different hospitals, begging them to guide me to a doctor who could help me. “If you’ve already been tested for vertigo and you don’t have it, then we can’t help you,” they said.
I helped myself. I kept searching online to understand this beast. I started becoming hyper-aware of every sensation in my body. What does this tingle mean, why do I feel this pressure here, what is this phantom tilt? I scanned myself from head to toe when I was alone with my thoughts. Who could be prepared for this undetectable motion that mentally knocks you off your feet? I went back to the hospital for a full body checkup to rule out any medical issues. The doctor gave me a thumbs-up after reading my report. I didn’t tell him I had MdDS because I didn’t want to be referred to more doctors who wouldn’t be able to give me solutions. I took solace that on paper, I am healthy, even if it didn’t get me off the boat.
I swayed on and off throughout the day, waiting to go to sleep. But when I open my eyes every morning, I have exactly one second of blissful amnesia before I remember. I am still on my boat. As I throw my legs over the side of the bed, I relearn that I can’t get up as quickly as I used to, and I take unbalanced steps to the bathroom. It’s still here.
Every day feels like a threat, one that I’m bracing for as soon as I emerge from sleep. It has been three months now. The day that I was supposed to be cured has come and gone. I do deep breathing, meditation, sometimes I call the hospital again knowing there is no answer. I wait and wait, yet I stay on the boat.
We have had 14 ice cream Fridays now since the earthquake. I don’t threaten to cancel them anymore because the children should savor their innocence. They are fixated on their scoop, sometimes topped with sprinkles or marshmallows. Not a word is said as every spoonful and slurp makes its way joyfully to their tummies. Then we stand up. The kids gleefully run out of the ice cream shop, and I trail behind, the ground rising and falling beneath my feet.
