So here's the latest 411 on my favorite vestibular disorder.
Yesterday I went to this vestibular therapist– it's a sub-specialty of Physical Therapy that is focussed on balance and inner ear issues. I had hoped that she could work wonders with my daily dizziness, the positional vertigo piece of the puzzle that my ENT thought I had in addition to the Menieres. They call it BPPV, and it's about these little floating crystals in the fluid in your inner ear. If they get in the wrong place, you get horrible dizziness, but on the other hand they are apparently easy to put back.Several people have sent me stories of sudden and complete recovery from vertigo with a simple head manipulation. So, hey, I hoped!!
Anyway, it was not to be. The lady, my new BFF Gina, threw me around a bit, leaning me backwards suddenly with my head to one side, and things like that. Then she would gaze directly at my eyes to see if I had any of the nystagmus– involuntary eye movements that reveal your dizziness. However try as she might, she could not provoke my eyes to do that. Thus she could not determine any crystal in the wrong place and could not fix it. "You do not have positional vertigo," she declared.
However, another test was more revealing. In this test, she had me look at an eye chart maybe 6 feet away. I could read almost the bottom line, better than 20/20 (it's my near vision that's gone to pot). Then while she had me looking at the eye chart, she shook my head violently from side to side and asked me to read a line, while she was shaking it. This was horrible!! And the line I could read was pretty huge. She counted afterwards and said that I had lost 8 lines of vision, and a normal person would have lost only 1 or 2. Then I had to walk across a room, stop suddenly, pivot, walk while looking side to side and up and down, and all that sort of thing. She kept track of when I lost my balance the most.
Bottom line after all this, she said that I am "visually dependent." I'm using my eyes for balance because my inner ear is sucking ass. (That's the lay term for it.) This explains why I couldn't cope with the farmer's market (and was dizzy for two days after trying it)– The grass was mowed fairly evenly, but it hid contours. Thus my foot would land just slightly higher or lower than I anticipated based on what I saw. The result: dizziness. WHy dizziness? Well, the brain is getting all sorts of information– from the left ear comes wrong, distorted information. From the right ear, correct information. From the sensation of the ground under my feet, additional information. From eyes, the horizon, additional information. When something surprising happens, my brain quite easily gets overloaded, can't make sense of it, and I get real, real dizzy.
I asked her why stepping ankle deep into a calm lake was so horrible for me (total nausea and dizziness at once!)– well, she explained, you hide your feet from your eyes, you add shifting ground under your feet, you add buoyancy, and effectively you've immediately overloaded your brain. Why can't I tolerate darkness? "darkness is not your friend," she said. "You are visually dependent. You need your eyes for balance. Take away the key thing you rely on, and it's like sending a blind person into traffic."
However, the good news about this is that she can actually help me with this. She can't help me with the Meniere's itself– she can't keep away vertigo attacks or make them milder or anything like that. But this visual thing is causing my every-day dizziness in between attacks, and it would surely be a help to at least make that part go away!
I have to basically train my brain to use a new organ for a new task. So I have this exercise I'm supposed to do three times a day: put a magazine or a piece of newsprint on the wall about arm's length away. Fix your gaze on one specific letter. Then turn your head, side to side, while keeping your gaze fixed on the letter. Go faster and faster until it starts to blur, or go double, or whatever. Shoot for 60 seconds in a row. I didn't do it yesterday, because I felt pretty rough all day after she had dizzied me up. And today, I've been dizzy and nauseated the whole time. I can't even fathom trying such thing while I'm already dizzy– and I don't think she'd want me to.
Tomorrow we leave for Pawleys Island SC. I'm trying to imagine what I will be able to do there now that swimming in the ocean and lying in hammocks and sitting in rocking chairs are all out of the question. But I can sit on the beach and read– I think I will be able to do this. The boys will be occupied. Ben will be there to chase them. Other kids will be there and lots of sand-water projects that can be so absorbing. Someone else will cook the meals and tidy up the room. They have laundry service. And so, all in all I hope it will be restful!
I'm not looking forward to the drive tomorrow– why does West Virginia have to be so mountainous??– but I have drugs. I can take them if I want to just go to a dark inky pool far away and wake up when we get there.