Sejer’s Recurrent Dizziness

Konrad Sejer’s recurrent dizziness is an unresolved physical problem that interrupts his work and ordinary routines, then turns uncertainty about his health into a source of fear. The spells are brief but disorienting: the city seems to move, his balance shifts, and he worries that the symptoms may signal something serious. When he finally attends a medical centre, no diagnosis or test result is yet available.

Symptoms and Their Recurrence

The dizziness intrudes while Sejer is working through an investigation. After speaking with Gunilla Mørk and Sverre Skarning’s young wife, he tries to organize what he has learned about a Polish student and the man’s appearance. His attention is pulled away from those accounts by a frightening possibility: whether the spells and loss of balance could count as asymmetric symptoms. The question connects an immediate bodily sensation to the possibility of paralysis, and he struggles to set that fear aside.

The same problem recurs while Sejer is walking through the city with Frank. A sudden spell makes the streets and back alleys seem to sail away; Sejer moves close to a house wall, leans against it, and waits for the episode to pass. Frank stops and looks up at him. Sejer notices that he has wobbled to the left, as he believes he always does, and again wonders whether the unevenness might be medically significant. He tests less alarming explanations against the sensation, considering calcified veins in his neck or anaemia, but neither possibility is confirmed.

Fear and Self-Interpretation

The spells matter not only as episodes of lost balance but as occasions when Sejer’s imagination races ahead of the evidence. In the fading light after thinking about the investigation, he describes the dizziness to himself as though his legs might buckle. He rejects paralysis as an explanation, yet the dismissal does not restore calm: he still fears that the person behind the frightening game may be exploiting his anxiety about age and death. His thoughts turn from the symptom to the idea that his heart is nearing the end of its long work. The episode therefore joins a practical concern about balance to a broader fear of mortality, without establishing that the dizziness has any connection to the investigation or its perpetrator.

The city walk makes the uncertainty more concrete. Sejer can identify a recurring direction to his wobble, but he cannot tell whether that pattern is a meaningful sign or an ordinary physical cause. His attempts to explain it to himself—first as a possible asymmetric symptom, then as a problem involving his neck or blood—show him moving between alarm and reassurance rather than reaching an answer. The text gives the reader his hypotheses, not a medical conclusion.

Seeking Medical Advice

Eventually, the concern leads Sejer to make an appointment. After work, when there has still been no news from Johnny Beskow, he drives to the medical centre for the dizziness that comes and goes and continues to worry him. The timing places this decision amid an unresolved police matter, but the account treats his appointment as a response to his own persistent symptoms, not as a development in Johnny’s case.

Even before receiving medical advice, Sejer anticipates the consultation and the wait that may follow. While trying to read, he finds the letters difficult to focus on and wonders how long the episodes have been occurring. He imagines the doctor asking about their duration and his family’s medical history; he recalls that his relatives were generally healthy and lived to old age. He also anticipates laboratory tests and a wait of fourteen days or perhaps three weeks, a period in which, he fears, his imagination could run wild. A brain tumour is one possibility he raises to himself, not a diagnosis supplied by a doctor.

Possible Explanations and Unresolved Outcome

After leaving the medical centre, Sejer looks back at its frosted-glass double doors and recalls possible explanations that his son-in-law Erik, a doctor, had previously mentioned. These include a medication side effect, although Sejer takes no medication; a sudden fall in blood pressure after sitting still and standing; labyrinthitis, an inner-ear infection; and Ménière’s disease, which he associates with severe bouts of dizziness and possible hearing loss and ringing in the ears. The list widens the range of possibilities but does not identify the cause of his own symptoms.

The account ends without reporting examination findings, test results, or a treatment. Sejer has moved from privately monitoring the spells and imagining explanations to seeking professional assessment, but uncertainty remains. That gap is central to the portrayal: a man accustomed to gathering details and weighing evidence must wait for evidence about his own body, while fear supplies possibilities that observation alone cannot settle.