Osborn battling vertigo while coaching
SLIPPERY ROCK — It comes on suddenly.
The spinning. The nausea. The anxiety.
Amber Osborn has to scurry for a place to lay down to wait for the vertigo to pass.
It usually takes between 10 and 15 minutes for the world to stop whirling as if the Earth was knocked off its axis.
As quickly as it starts, it ends.
But it leaves a lasting impression on Osborn during the three to four times a week it occurs.
“I just want to be able to look back at this moment in time and say, 'Wow, I went through that and I got through that,'” Osborn said.
That moment hasn't come yet for the Slippery Rock High girls basketball coach, who has had to learn to deal with what she calls “episodes” while trying to get her young Rockets ready for the season.
“Everyone has something they have to deal with in their lives,” Osborn said. “This is just mine.”
Osborn was a standout basketball player at Grove City High and Slippery Rock University as a point guard. Back then, Amber McFeely, Osborn took more spills and bangs to the head than she can count with no ill-effects.
But it was a soccer ball booted hard against the right side of her head that sent her ordeal into motion.
Osborn was attending her eldest son's soccer game in late September of last year when she was struck hard in the head by an errant soccer ball.
The vertigo started the next day.
Eventually doctors diagnosed her with Miniere's Disease, a disorder of the inner ear that causes vertigo, fluctuating hearing loss and ringing in the ear.
Doctors think a concussion caused by the blow to her head by the soccer ball caused her Miniere's.
A full story appears in the Butler Eagle.
