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Dizziness Nearly Cost Me My Accounting Career. The Answer Was Sitting in My Facebook Feed the Whole Time.

"Nobody could tell me why a spreadsheet made the room move. And I kept making mistakes I'd never made in 14 years."

Denise Harmon
July 21, 2026

The first time it happened at work, I was 300 rows deep in a client's depreciation schedule. The screen started to slide sideways, and the room went with it. I gripped the edge of my desk with both hands, waited for the floor to come back, and then did what I'd been doing for months. I kept scrolling.

I'm a tax accountant. I've been one for 14 years. My entire job is staring at a bright white grid for 10 hours a day, and by last spring, that grid had become the one thing my brain could no longer handle.

Scrolling a spreadsheet felt like standing on a boat in weather.

That April I signed off on returns for our 2 biggest clients with the estimated payments entered wrong. One of them got an IRS notice. The firm ate the penalty. I caught the error myself, 3 days too late, and sat in my car in the parking garage and cried.

Gary, our managing partner, closed his door and asked if things were okay at home. I said yes, because they were. Then he said the sentence I still hear at night: "I need to know I can put your name on a return." He moved both clients to a second-year associate for the rest of the season. 14 years without missing a deadline, and my work was now being double-checked by someone I trained.

I was too dizzy to do my job, and I looked too healthy for anyone to believe me.

What I didn't know yet, sitting in that meeting, was that my problem had a name, that thousands of women had it, and that I'd been actively deleting the answer from my phone since October.

Two years of "everything looks normal"

It had crept up on me over about 2 years. There was no spinning, nothing dramatic enough to describe. Just a sway, like I'd stepped off a boat nobody else had been on. Some days the office floor had a give to it, like walking across a mattress. Fluorescent lights made it worse. Scrolling made it unbearable.

My MRI was clean. My bloodwork was perfect. The ENT did the crystal maneuver twice and nothing changed. I was offered anxiety medication before anyone offered me an explanation. One doctor asked, gently, if I'd considered talking to someone.

I started to wonder if I was losing my mind.

And you can't show anyone a sway. My husband believed me, mostly, but I watched him run out of things to say. Karen in payroll asked if I was pregnant. Twice.

So I did what you do in April. I pushed through. And the harder I pushed, the deeper the bad days got, until an hour at the monitor was costing me a whole evening flat on the couch with my eyes closed.

Then, a few nights after the meeting with Gary, I typed one sentence into Google at 1am. It ended up giving me my career back.

"Dizzy when scrolling, not spinning, worse with screens"

That was the whole search. It took me to a forum for a condition I had never once heard a doctor say out loud: vestibular migraine. Migraine that lives in your balance system instead of your head, sometimes with barely any headache at all. I'd had maybe a dozen real headaches in my life, which is exactly why nobody, including me, ever thought migraine.

A woman there described her days and accidentally described mine. The boat feeling. The floor with the give in it. The fog. Looking completely normal while the world moves underneath you. Screens were her worst trigger too, and there's even a name for that: visual vertigo. Underneath her post, hundreds of comments saying some version of "me too" and "nobody believes me either."

Strangers on the internet believed me before my own doctors did.

And buried in that thread was the detail that explained my whole spring: pushing through makes it worse. Every hour I'd white-knuckled at the monitor had been digging the hole deeper. Nobody had warned me, because nobody had believed there was anything to warn me about.

The ad I'd been deleting since October

Here's where I have to confess something embarrassing.

Once I knew the words "vestibular migraine," I realized I'd been seeing them for months. In an ad. On Facebook. A jar called Mighty, made by a husband and wife who both dealt with migraine, something about the nutrients migraine runs down. It had been in my feed since at least October. I'm fairly sure I hit "hide ad" on it once. I'm an accountant. I don't buy things Facebook tells me to buy.

But it was 2am, my career-ending mystery illness had just gotten a name, and this ad was using that name. So I did the only thing I know how to do with a claim I don't trust. I audited it.

The label disclosed everything. Every ingredient, every amount, no "proprietary blend" hiding the numbers. I pulled up the actual studies and tied it out line by line, like a workpaper. The riboflavin matched the trial where 59% of people saw their attack frequency cut in half. The magnesium was the glycinate form, the one that's actually absorbed. And there was a 90-day money-back guarantee, which meant the downside was my time, not my money.

"I'd spent 2 years and 4 doctors getting nowhere. The thing that finally made sense was an ad I'd been deleting."

Day 12

Week 1: nothing. I kept a log anyway, obviously.

Somewhere around day 12 or 13, I finished an entire return, scrolling and all, and realized at 6pm that I hadn't grabbed the desk once. I didn't trust it. I'd had good days before, and I'd learned the hard way not to celebrate them.

By the end of the first month, the bad days had gone from most days to about 2 a week. The afternoon fog lifted with them, which I hadn't even known was part of the same problem.

I want to be honest about the other thing I felt, because relief was only half of it. I was angry. That ad had been in my feed since October. Between October and April I lost my 2 best clients, most of a season, and a piece of my professional reputation. I did the math on those months, because doing the math is my whole personality. 2 amended returns. 1 penalty. 1 closed-door meeting I'll never fully forget.

This tax season

Gary gave me back both clients in January. No speech. He just started routing work to me again, which from Gary is a love letter. In March he stopped at my desk, knocked twice on the partition, and said, "Whatever you changed, keep doing it."

I still get a rough day after a terrible night of sleep. But I'd guess I was having 8 or 10 bad days a month last spring, and now it's 1 or 2, and shallow. Full client load. Extensions filed. Nothing amended. Nobody hovering behind my chair.

The explanation that finally made sense to me: keeping you balanced is one of the most energy-expensive things your brain does, and when the fuel behind it runs low, balance is the first thing to go wobbly. The fog and the crash come from the same shortage. Mighty puts back 12 of the exact things a migraine brain burns through, in one daily dose instead of a counter full of separate bottles.

Maybe I wasn't losing my mind after all.

Maybe I could stay the person my clients thought I was.

Maybe next April could just be busy, instead of terrifying.

If screens do to you what they did to me, and the best explanation anyone has offered you is stress, I hope you find this faster than I did. It has a name. And apparently the answer can show up in the dumbest possible place, between a recipe video and someone's vacation photos.