Hormone Stories

“The Weight of Air” — A Cambridge Clinic Story

• The waiting room was unusually quiet that morning. Only the soft hum of the air vent and the faint scratch of rain against the glass filled the silence. She was sixteen — pale, neat, and smaller than she appeared on the referral letter. Her mother sat beside her, scrolling through messages, lips pressed tight.
• Her name was Isla.
• She had been dizzy for almost a year.
• When she first described it, the word came out like a confession.
  “It’s like… the floor moves, or maybe I do. I don’t faint — I just feel like I might.”
• She’d been to the GP, to ENT, to neurology. Each test had been kind. Normal bloods, perfect MRI, textbook heart rhythm. Even the vestibular function test, with its spinning chair and cold air in the ears, ended with the reassuring, yet unsatisfying phrase: “All clear.”
• And yet, Isla’s world still tilted.
• At the Cambridge Adolescent Clinic, she sat opposite Dr. Qazi, a physician with the kind of calm that absorbs anxious energy.
  He asked her about salt, hydration, sleep, sugar. She answered politely, eyes darting between the clock and the floor.
• Her pulse barely changed with posture. Reflexes normal. Vision steady.
  He tapped gently at the computer, then stopped.
• “Tell me, Isla,” he said softly, “when do you feel the dizziness most?”
• She hesitated. Her mother looked up.
  “Mostly… when they argue,” she whispered.
• The mother blinked. “What do you mean, darling?”
• Isla’s voice broke, small and sudden:
  “When you and Dad fight. I feel like I disappear.”
• The clinic was very still for a moment.
  What had been a medical mystery slowly began to take shape — not in the language of blood tests or scans, but in the quiet grammar of emotion.
• Her dizziness, it turned out, wasn’t the kind that comes from the inner ear or the blood pressure cuff. It was the kind that comes when the ground beneath a family shifts too often — when safety itself feels uncertain.
• The body, clever and loyal, had done its best to speak when words could not.
• Over the next few months, Isla was referred to child psychology.
  She began therapy. She started journaling. The dizzy spells softened — not all at once, but gently, like the tide receding.
• When she returned to the clinic for follow-up, she smiled for the first time.
  Her blood pressure was the same, her labs unchanged — but the way she occupied the room had altered.
• Dr. Qazi noted: “Symptoms improving. No organic cause identified. Psychogenic component likely — linked to family stress.”
• He didn’t add what he was thinking:
  that sometimes healing doesn’t come from medicine at all,
  but from being heard.
• That afternoon, as Isla and her mother left the hospital and stepped into the pale Cambridge sunlight, the girl paused.
  The ground felt steady again — not because it had changed, but because, for the first time, someone had helped her find her balance within it.