Well, it’s a long weekend here in Canada (a very long weekend for me, since July 1st is Canada Day, and I also took an extra day off on Monday). This usually means lots of travelling in the car, and for us dizziness sufferers, some uncomfortable times.

I thought I’d provide a quick list of things that seem to work well for me when I have to travel as far as keeping the dizziness at a minimum:

1. If at all possible, be the one driving. Strange as it may sound, I get much more dizzy when someone else is driving. I think it’s that I can’t anticipate the shifts in balance as quickly as when I have to pay attention to them.

2. Avoid caffeine and be wary of medications. Caffeine makes you jumpy and agitated, and is just going to make your dizziness worse. If you’re too tired and feel like you need caffeine to keep going, take a break instead (and a quick nap somewhere safe off the road if you can). Avoiding medications that make you drowsy is also an obvious one — being safe should be your first concern.

[Read more]

Fortunately, when the weather improves, it always seems to help with my symptoms of imbalance — I don’t know if this is psychosomatic or if there actually is some physiological cause for it, but it definitely seems to be the case.

I don’t know if this is the case for anyone else, but I find clear, sunny weather is when my symptoms abate the most — and overcast, rainy and even chilly weather is when my symptoms are the worst.

I realize that sunny and clear summer weather is bound to improve both your mood and your general outlook on life (at least it certainly does for me), and in my case, more daylight during the summer hours is helpful as well.

But is there an actual link between weather and balance symptoms? Does anyone know of a link, or at least share these types of symptoms that improve/worsen based on the weather?

I mentioned before that the meclizine was really helping things. It would seem however, that for some reason, it’s no longer really helping very much at all.

I’ve frequently been waking up with very dizzy, falling sensations. It’s especially bad in the morning when I wake up — and it’s starting to drive me a little nuts.

It’s tough to deal with, especially when I thought I had somewhat of a solution with the meclizine. I’m still taking it, and it seems to keep things from getting overwhelmingly dizzy, but it’s not doing nearly what it was before.

The comment about these being referred to as “drop attacks” is right on the money. That’s exactly like what they feel like — one minute I’m sitting or standing comfortably doing something, the next I feel like I’m tumbling through space.

[Read more]

I use a shared hosting account provided by BlueHost, which allows me to keep costs down for running this site. The downside of this is, however, that there was a pretty major denial-of-service attack against the server where I host my site.

Fortunately, my site’s structure seems to have survived the attack, even though I was getting all kinds of errors for the past 4 days (which kept me from posting anything, unfortunately — I was only able to comment on posts).

The site also got flooded with comment spam, some of which was actually getting through the various safeguards I put in place to prevent it. I’ve now installed some new protection measures which will hopefully keep things from getting too spammy any time soon.

So if you noticed any weird site behaviour over the past few days, that would be the explanation. Thanks for you patience with the site problems, and thanks again for stopping by Vertigo Guy.

I just got back from the gym, where I did some running on the treadmill and about another 15 minutes on the elliptical machine. I followed that with a bit of light weights, and a some stretching.

I’ve noticed that while I’m on the elliptical, or especially while I’m running, my balance seems to be horrible. Well, it’s not my balance itself exactly, it’s that I feel completely off balance.

And when I get off the treadmill, I actually feel like the room is spinning around — it takes about 5 minutes of walking around the room for the feeling to go away. But several hours later, I actually feel better than I did before I went to exercise. Then again, maybe I’m just pleased with myself that I went and got some exercise.

If you’ve been following my posts, you probably already know that I’ve had two distinct instances of severe vertigo in my life. I know there are other people who have had more than that, and I definitely feel for those who have had vertigo more often than that.

I do have to put up with lesser vertigo on a daily basis however, which usually leads me to avoid substances that change the way you feel (alcohol or caffeine for example).

However, before the onset of both episodes of my acute vertigo, I was consuming a far higher than average amount of alcohol in the week preceding the attacks. So the obvious question is, is there a relationship between the alcohol and the vertigo?

[Read more]

Dizzy Dame has a great post about the difficulty of dealing with a condition that is essentially invisible to others. I completely agree that this condition is a really tough thing to explain to someone, especially when I function and act normally all the time.

I think it starts to make other people wonder if you’re really just making it up or think it’s all just in your head. For some people however, there are other very unfortunate side effects of a vestibular illness. Take my sister for example.

Like me, my sister was diagnosed with something that either vestibular neuritis or labyrinthitis, and she suffered from the same horrible vertigo that I did. Unfortunately though, she went completely deaf in that ear within a few days of being sick. Yep, that’s right — totally deaf in one ear. So while she’s totally lost her hearing, it would be pretty difficult for anyone to say she’s not really deaf.

[Read more]

When I described my visit to the neurotologist recently, I mentioned that he prescribed me 12.5 milligrams of meclizine three times per day. This initially seemed like quite a bit to me — but after doing some research, I guess it’s pretty much the lowest dosage possible.

Meclizine, which is often sold under the brand names Bonine and Antivert, is both an antihistamine and an antiemetic (it prevents vertigo). Mine came in 25 mg tablets that I can break in half and tastes like some gross artificial berry that doesn’t actually exist in nature (yes, I had to chew it just to see what it tasted like).

While I was hesitant about taking it at first, I took some yesterday, last night and today, and I find it actually helps substantially. I almost feel 100% while taking it (there’s still a slight twinge of something there once in a while, but it comes and goes).

[Read more]

As another small reward to the people who decide to leave a comment here, I’ve decided to implement another WordPress plugin (Show Top Commentators) that shows the most comments left here by users.

If you have you’re own website, you’ll also get another nice link back to your own site from here as well. It’s just one additional reward for anyone who decides to leave a comment.

I’ll be working on some other new features for the site in the next little while, so look for more new features soon. Thanks again for reading Vertigo Guy and good health to everyone.

I mentioned before that I wanted to get the Wii Fit in order to try it out for balance exercises. Well, lo and behold, the Wii Fit seems to be sold out everywhere in North America!

While I’m also looking to buy a bicycle this summer (which will hopefully allow me to get some much-needed exercise as well), I was really looking forward to exercise with the Wii Fit. I’m going to keep trying to track one down, but it’s been several fruitless weeks.

Hopefully I’ll be able to locate a Wii Fit so that I can start my balance-improvement experiment with it. I’ve also heard that yoga is good for retraining balance, so the Wii Fit yoga would be a great thing to check out. Wish me luck finding one!