Dizzy Comes and Dizzy Goes

When I get up in the morning I feel as if I have set sail on a cruise...a 3 hour cruise, if you get my drift. It's not a nice boat, so you feel every sway of the ship, and, though those 7 passengers were lucky enough to find that island, I have not been able to find that blasted place! The simplest things, scooping something out of a bowl, looking down to make sure that my socks are matching, bending over the sink to brush my teeth, all of them increase the dizziness. If I've decided to give going out a try (going to the grocery store with my mother, etc), by the time I've got myself dressed and ready to go, I'm ready to go to bed! I cannot walk without assistance because, after some testing by the physical therapist, I fall into the category of someone who is at risk of falling due to whatever it is that is going on with me.

After the physical therapist put me through some rather torturous tests, she decided that she thinks that it is possibly one of two things that are causing my symptoms. The first hypothesis is that I HAD an inner ear infection back in February when this all started and just didn't know it, thus causing cells in my inner ear to either have been killed off or damaged causing the vertigo and balance issues. The second hypothesis is that I suffer from atypical migraines which, like the inner ear infection, have either killed off or damaged cells in my inner ear thus causing my vertigo. She's leaning more toward the atypical migraines because I suffer from occasional headaches ("migraines"), but, unlike the typical migraine sufferer, I cannot take medicine and sleep off the headache. Plus, a twitch of the eye or hand usually accompanies my headaches.

My therapist has given me one exercise to start out with and I will start seeing her once a week to do exercises with her to try and fatigue the vertigo and make it go away. At this point, I have been doing the exercise the best that I can, but today has not been a good day. What little I ate came back up in my best impersonation of Linda Blair. On the upside, I've lost about 10 pounds, so I'm trying very hard to look at the up side of things. At least I know that this isn't all in my head (i.e. it's not really happening), but that it truly is something that happens to people and, over time, can be cured or managed.