DIZZY’S SMOKEHOUSE IS THE PRODUCT OF A LIFELONG DREAM AND A HORRIBLE CHANGE OF CIRCUMSTANCES COMING TOGETHER AT PERHAPS JUST THE RIGHT TIME…
Nathan Joslin aka “Dizzy”
Hi, I guess you were really bored enough to click that link and here you are. Well, I reckon I’d better tell you a little about myself then……my name is Nathan Joslin and I was born in Fort Polk, Louisiana to parents serving in the U.S. Army. Upon their retirement from active duty, a move back home to Illinois was in order and ultimately Riverton was where we chose to call home.
We had a small grain farm operation that was my dad’s second job when he wasn’t fixing one of mine or my brother’s motorcycles. We raced all over the united states during our younger years……I don’t know how any of us survived it to be honest. Anyway, when I wasn’t going to school or on a motorcycle, I snuck away to the swamps of Eastern North Carolina to spend time with my grandparents. I spent each summer and winter break there from the time I was six years old until well into my adult years. It was down there that I really had my first taste of “good” barbecue.
Grandpa and I would hunt literally everything from squirrel to black bear and Grandma and I would go fishing and then afterwards tend her world-class garden. I killed my first bear at 12 years old and there wasn’t a bit that went to waste, nose to tail, with a lot of it succumbing to the BBQ pit.
There are certainly lots of different variations of BBQ out there that are good, but something about Grandma’s hot and sour flavors down their in North Carolina still make me think that’s how it was really ‘supposed’ to be.
Just before graduating high school, I saw an ad in the paper for a job at a manufacturing plant in Taylorville and figured I’d go work there for the summer and hang out with my buddies until they went off to their universities and I attended community college. Whew, God certainly had other plans for me! Turns out the job at the plant was not any old ordinary summer job but an opportunity that would lead to a truly fulfilling and rewarding career! I fell in love with the work and the bosses and put my head down and truly never looked back……I was in it for the long haul.
A couple years later I was blessed with my first child, a baby boy that has turned out to be my “mini-me”. A little unconventionally, we waited eight more years before having our second child but dad got his little girl and my heart just melted. I truly felt blessed to have two beautiful, happy, healthy children that were the light of my life. Unfortunately, life happened and one divorce later I had to ‘get back on the horse’ that threw me (not the same one!) and connected with my beautiful wife Kristina. We ‘blended’ our two families (she had two children from a previous marriage as well) together and have become one big very happy family and I truly never knew true happiness until I met her.
So at this point everything is now cruising along well again in our now much larger house with four kids running around. Running kids to ball practice, games here and there, FFA, work schedules and overtime are piling up on the both of us, you know, regular adulting life. I always had something in the smoker or on the grill. Life was great for about ten years or so before things changed…
Dizzy’s Whole Family
In January 2020, I started having ‘minimal’ dizzy spells. I say minimal because I’m a stubborn ass and won’t go to the doctor until I’m half dead so you know, they weren’t any big deal, yet. Sometimes I would just start spinning and it would feel like I had just gotten off the merry-go-round as a kid at school, after the other kids had spun it real fast. These spells wouldn’t last too long, maybe 10 seconds to a minute. No big deal, right? Well, over the next couple of months these occurrences got more frequent, lasted longer, and the spinning became more violent. In March 2020, just a few days before the first state ‘lockdown’ due to Covid-19, I was unlocking the plant where I worked at and was walking down a warehouse aisle when all of the sudden I started spinning terribly and uncontrollably turned hard right and down to the cement floor I went. Face first, BAM! There I laid, bloodied & vomiting from the extreme vertigo, until the first employee showed up for work that morning and could help me. It just so happened that my son was working for us part time and happened to be the first to the plant that day……it scared the daylights out of him!
The first thing the doctor said when I described the symptoms was “you’ve got a tumor.” Wow, way to lead with the good news first Doc! After what seemed like countless tests, pokes, prods, and doctors visits, nobody could seem to tell me what was wrong. There was no tumor, thank God! I was able to go back to work, but these spell kept happening and I could not find any rhyme or reason to them or any kind of pattern before that would explain what was causing them. Ultimately, I was able to see an ENT (Ear, Nose & Throat) doctor who had seen these symptoms before and after a few more tests to rule other things out, determined that I had Meniere’s Disease in my right ear.
Meniere's disease is an inner ear problem that can cause dizzy spells, also called vertigo, and hearing loss. Most of the time, Meniere's disease affects only one ear. The cause(s) of Meniere’s disease are unknown and there is no cure. There are a few treatment methods that help reduce symptoms in some patients, some of the time, but that is it. Less than 1% of the world’s population suffers from this disease, so it is relatively rare, but can be debilitating depending on the severity of both the vertigo attacks and the hearing loss caused by the scarring of the inner ear.
After six months or so I noticed that the hearing in my right ear was getting worse. After discussing this with my ENT doctor and going through several hearing tests it was confirmed that I had significant hearing loss in my right ear, caused by this disease. The vertigo spells were getting worse and now I was losing my hearing. Things were not looking good, but at least I was able to keep working and functioning like normal, a lot of the time.
Then, things got bad, real bad. All of the sudden the vertigo attacks got WAY worse, were happening WAY more often, and instead of being able to recover pretty quickly it was literally taking
me a week to recover from an attack, if I was lucky. Something was different. I could barely get out of bed, was routinely falling at home just trying to get from the bed to the bathroom, and even took a spill down an entire flight of stairs on several occasions. All of this is going on during the height of the Covid pandemic so you know how fun it was trying to get in to see a doctor at this point! After finally getting an appointment face to face, and getting the right tests ran and results read, it became obvious that I now was bilateral, meaning I now had Meniere’s disease in both ears. This explained why things got so much worse so fast because now both ears were messing with me and I was getting the ‘double whammy’ so to speak. I’m the ‘lucky’ guy that got the less than 1% disease in my right ear but then got the same disease in the left ear which has about a 0.01% chance of happening, all in the same year.
I reached out to every major health institution I could find looking for hope and was either turned down or ultimately given the same answers……there’s not really anything more we can do for you than your doctor is already doing. Drink lots of water, take your diuretic, reduce your sodium intake to less than half the normal daily value of a traditional diet, and reduce stress…….these are the ‘treatment’ methods for Meniere’s disease. I was already doing all of these, however I did still have a lot of stress centered around my job. This disease had brought me down so much and the attacks were so frequent that I had gone from working 50-60 hours per week to sometimes barely being able to manage 10, and when I was able to make it to the plant, I was always playing catch-up and not moving forward like we needed to be doing. All this was stressing me to the max, and stress is a trigger for these Meniere’s episodes, and the vicious cycle was continuing. Something had to change so ultimately, in early 2024 my employer and parted ways after 25 years of wonderful work together and wished each other well.
With a boat load of stress removed, I can say that I am feeling significantly better, although I do still have episodes. They’ll never go away completely, and my hearing will continue to slowly fade away with time. However, with what time I do have left I’m going to use it doing something I truly love and that is feeding people. Cooking for folks has been a passion of mine all of my adult life, and barbecue particularly, takes me back to my roots in North Carolina. Don’t worry, I’ve got more flavors than Grandma’s hot & sour BBQ sauce, but promise you’ll at least try it, for her.
So, I wrote way too much about poor old me and I expect you now know how I got the name Dizzy, but thanks for reading. I truly wouldn’t be here now if it weren’t for my loving wife and amazing kids helping me through the most trying time in my life. There’s a lot worse problems to have but I’m here to tell you, this ain’t no fun!
Dizzy signing off now, I’d better go cook something!