Ménière's Disease
One day in late November '97, just before Thanksgiving, I woke up feeling a bit dizzy. "Maybe," I thought to myself, "I'm just tired." I stumbled down the hall to the bathroom, bouncing off of walls a few times, to take a shower. When shampooing my hair, eyes closed and head tilted back, I became disoriented and nearly fell.
By the end of the day it had gotten considerably worse. I was unable to turn my head without feeling funny. As a graphic designer, I spend much of the day looking at my computer screen. When I looked beyond my computer and out the window I would get an odd spinning sensation. By 5:00 PM that day, upon leaving my office, I was unable to walk down the street without one hand on the shop windows.
This was not the first time that this had happened to me. Two years earlier, while working at The Java Hut, a Charlottesville coffeeshop, I'd experienced something quite similar. It lasted for a week. I took a motion-sickness drug, as perscribed over the phone by my doctor, which took away the nausea. I was unable to work while the symptoms persisted, though they ebbed and finally disappeared within a few days.
Now, a couple of years later, I was curious why this had reoccurred. Once again, I called my doctor. He asked if I'd had any colds recently, or if I was on any medication. It was a negative on each count. He named a few potential problems, none of which meant anything to me. His suggestion was to try taking Meclizine, an over-the-counter motion-sickness pill. It wouldn't take away the dizziness, but it would keep me from feeling ill as a result of it. That sounded good to me. I bought some that very night at CVS.
The next morning, before my bi-weekly English and history classes, I took my first pill. There was no obvious effect during the hour and a half of history. During English, however, the results of the Meclizine became clear. Within the first five minutes of class I began to shake and sweat. My dizziness became worse, and I found that I could not see clearly. I was unable to hold a piece of paper in my hand while keeping it steady enough to read the words printed upon it. The other students in the class became concerned, and suggested that I leave class to go to the hospital. I waited, however, until class was finished. My girlfriend drove me to my doctor's office, as I'd been unable to drive for the last couple of days. He saw me immediately. By then, over two hours after the initial reaction had occurred, most of these new symptoms had receded.
He spent ten minutes having me look around the room, follow his finger, touch my nose...all kinds of things. I did fine on all of them. His best guess was that I was allergic to Meclizine. The unfortuante result of that was that I was left with no way to control some of my symptoms. Before I left, he decided to run one final test. He took a low-frequency tuning folk, struck it against his hand, and placed it against the top of my skull.
The idea of that, he told me, is to test the lower end of the range of human hearing. It would not be normal to be able to hear that through the air. But by way of the skull, an excellent conductor of sound, I should be able to hear it just fine. I could hear it, as he'd said, but only in my left ear. "Hear" is the wrong word, though. I didn't so much hear it as I felt it. And I sure couldn't feel it in my right ear.
That was when my mother, my girlfriend and I started to do a little homework. I posted messages on several Internet mailing lists and newsgroups, describing my symptoms to my long-time friends that also used those groups. I'd hoped that they would either be familiar with whatever was causing these, or know of times when similar symptoms had manifested themselves that I had forgotten about. I got dozens of replies, with everything from diabetes to cancer to tinnitis suggested. My girlfriend, however, hit pay dirt.
"Ménière's Disease," she told me.
"Huh?" I replied intelligently.
She went on to explain some of the basic symptoms. They all fit. I'd never really paid it much mind, but I'd had off-and-on ringing in my ears. For over a decade, since I was a young child, my right ear had grown crackily and staticky when exposed to certain types of sounds, or when I decended or ascended a mountain. I'd always intended to mention it to a doctor, but never had.
I returned to my doctor, and he gave me a casual diagnosis: Ménière's Disease. He suggested that I make an appointment at a local hearing specialist and have them test me, which I did. A couple of weeks later I found myself in the office of a self-proclaimed specialist who was unable to pronounce "Ménière's." I spent two hours there, and they did just about everything with my ears that they could. They blew air in them, spun me around, played tones and had me repeat words and phrases at different volumes.
At the end, the diagnosis: Probably Ménière's. I was given a prescription for Valium, 2 mg of which can help temporarily quell the symptoms, at least long enough to get off a busy highway or find a place to lie down. I always carry one in my wallet.
Ménière's has made me more cautious when I hike, and more alert when my symptoms start to act up. The hearing in my right ear has grown worse in the months since my diagnosis, and I fear that I will lose the hearing entirely in the years to come. I've had occasional Ménière's-like symptoms in my left ear, but I've chosen to ignore them for now, in hopes that they'll go away. I'll probably take a casual shot at learning sign language. I see formal classes as a white flag, a surrendering of my body to Ménière's Disease.
7/1/99 Wow. I'm doing well. At the advice of a doctor, I've started taking magnesium every day. I almost never get dizzy anymore, and my tinnitis is nearly non-existent. I'm going to turn 21 at the end of the month, so I'll find out then what sort of an effect that alcohol has on things. I've only had to take my Valium once, ever, so I think that I'm doing pretty well. I recommend magnesium for everybody out there. I've been taking 500mg each day -- that's 100% of the USRDA for Magensium. It's available at any pharmacy, and only costs a few bucks for 3 months' worth. You should probably be taking a magnesium supplement every day, anyway, so why not try it?
3/7/00 Alcohol + Ménière's Disease = Bummer. A single glass of red wine leaves me reeling. I recently had two and half glasses over a two-hour dinner, and I walked like a fall-down drunk. Mentally, I wasn't really affected. (About what you'd expect for a 160lb guy who just had 2.5 glasses of wine.) But I needed help to stand up and walk out of the restaurant. A tip: Enjoy alcohol in moderation. By this I mean no more than half a glass in an evening. And don't drive afterwards.
5/2/01 I haven't taken magnesium for a few months, and I'm fine. I haven't had tinnitis in months and months and I haven't had a dizzy spell in at least as long. Alcohol doesn't affect me as much as it used to, but it's still a bad scene after a relatively small amount. So the question is this: did the magnesium help me, or did I just start feeling better on my own? Given the logical reasons that magnesium should prove helpful, I suspect that the magnesium may have played a role, though I don't see any reason that magnesium would "cure" Ménière's after I've ceased to take it. Too bad I didn't set myself up as a proper test subject!
12/13/02 My tinnitis is back. Well, it doesn't seem like tinnitis, but it fits the definition, technically. I haven't been able to talk on the telephone using my right ear to listen since 1999, because when I do, my right ear quickly starts to hurt, and I hear a roaring sound that makes it impossible for me to hear what the other party is saying. Starting a couple of weeks ago, I started experiencing this at other times, in my left ear, even when sitting in a silent room without speaking or manipulating my jaw. The roaring lasts for 10-30 seconds and then subsides. To be fair, I haven't modified my lifestyle or diet in any way since things started to improve, so I ought to make some changes again, notably return to taking magnesium.
Related Resources
Ménière's.Org: The leading
on-line resource on Ménière's Disease. This is where I got much of
the information that was necessary for my self-diagnosis. Highly recommended.