Vertigo

This chapter is dedicated to everyone who, like me, has suffered from any form of dizziness, vertigo or migraines.

Dialogue in // implies it is translated Czech

Mairghread picked her way carefully out of the infirmary. It had taken some doing, convincing Uncle Carson that she was all right to go back to her apartments by herself (with, of course, her omnipresent guard), but at long last she had succeeded with the promise that she would climb back into bed and do her algebra and Greek exercises there.

She hoped he hadn't noticed how she had clung to solid furniture and walls, zigzagging across the infirmary in order to reach the door without falling over and without any help.

Now in the halls, she stayed close to the wall, her right hand brushing it lightly—it was the only way she could be sure she was roughly perpendicular to the floor.

At least, it started out that way. The farther she went the more she held up the wall. Or the wall was holding up her. Whichever way you chose to look at it.

"Mary?" a voice close to her ear startled her. It was Sgt. Kafka, assigned to her morning guard. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," she replied with the standard Atlantis answer.

"Pardon, but not so," he told her. "Wall does not need holding up. You are greener…than usual."

"Just a bit lightheaded," she lied. To say she was lightheaded was like saying a tsunami was a wavelet.

"Allow me to help, yes?" he asked.

She remembered in time not to shake her head. "/No, thank you. I just need to get to a transporter./"

"/You're at one/," he pointed out as the doors opened at his partner, Sgt. Kierkegaard's thought.

"Oh," she stepped gingerly inside with her escort, who told the transporter to take them nearest to Mairghread's quarters.

As it turned out, this was one of those ideas that has you going 'why the hell did I do this? And why didn't someone bloody well tell me it was an idiotic idea?'

As soon as the transporter began to move, Mairghread felt her stomach trying to make a bid for freedom, and her eyes decided that they no longer liked working together, and so each went their own way.

"Stop!"

Kierkegaard ordered the lift to stop and it opened into the mess hall. Mairghread stumbled out and landed sprawling at the feet of McKay and Sheppard when the floor decided it would prefer to be 60 degrees to the surface of the planet.

"Geez!" shouted McKay, stepping back from the wraithling kneeling on the floor and turning a strikingly similar color to a ripe kiwi.

"Mairghread? Are you okay?" inquired Sheppard as he tried to help her up, but she was perfectly content, nay, preferred to stay on the floor.

"Dr. Beckett give her retrovirus, make her…" at a loss for the correct word, Kafka wobbled dramatically to make his point.

"Just a little lightheaded," she gasped from her position of hugging the floor.

"That would be why you're clinging to the floor for dear life?" asked Sheppard with a smile as he pulled her into a sitting position.

Another bad idea, she thought with more than a little annoyance as not only did the floor dance beneath her but now there was a small contingent of knife-wielding maniacs in her head stabbing at her eyes and temples.

"Mary?" boomed John's voice in her ear, which invited a contingent of miners to the party in her head. She held her head in her hands and tried to hide away from the noise and motion and light.

"Beckett? I've got Mairghread here—looks like whatever you gave her is givin' her a migraine and jelly legs."

McKay gave him his prime sarcastic look. "Ya think?!"

And so she found herself back in the infirmary, clamping a pillow over her eyes and ears while Beckett explained to Ronon and Teyla what was going on.

"It appears one o' the nastier side effects of this retrovirus is migraine headaches in addition tae the usual lightheadedness," he was explaining.

Ronon continued to stare at him. Why did these earthling feel the need to constantly break up what they were saying?

"She'll be uncomfortable faer a few hours," Carson sighed. "And will probably have the same reaction for each of the 6 doses."

Ronon and Teyla looked over at their daughter. 'Uncomfortable' was probably a massive understatement, if Mairghread's white knuckles were any indication.

Mairghread shuddered inwardly. Six? Six?! Six of these headaches and vertigo attacks? Aie! Please no! Would someone please evict the riotous party in her head and post "Do Not Enter—Authorized Personnel Only" signs every 5 feet? The maniacs she could almost deal with. The miners were trying the outermost limits of her patience and endurance. But when drummers and bad piccolo players had arrived, that was it!

She wanted to weep at the merest prospect.

TBC

Next: Well, Did It Work?!